


The Game of Kings

by Endfall (philosopher)



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night (Visual Novel), Nasuverse - Fandom, Tsukihime
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-03 18:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 47,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philosopher/pseuds/Endfall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first, last, and final holy grail war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The War Upon the Throne Ends

# Prologue

  
  


 

## 01\. Caldera Valhallis

 

_ Somewhere that wasn't a place, there was a universe of blue. Behind time, before space, and somehow fundamentally  _ ** outside ** _ of everything, it stood as  _ _ a  _ _ testament to itself and its own eternal nature. This place we call Akasha. _

_ Beyond its centre, outside its edge, in a space that takes the Heart of the Root of All Things simply because the conscious minds within it decided it  _ ** must ** _ , a battle rages. Sparks, motes in a sea of transfinite blue flash, microscopic against the backdrop of eternity, but cataclysmic in their own right: Noble Phantasms, the weapons of Spirits of Old, Spirits of the Present Day, and Spirits that might Never Be. Heroes, one and all, they are venerated in tale and memory.  _ _ E _ _ ven in this songless age, they stand, transcendent, as perfect exemplars of the ideals of humankind. _

_ But all is not well. _

_ Noble Phantasms, after all, are not weapons to be used lightly; least so here, in the Throne of Heroes upon the Root of the World - for though death might never come to these perfected and immortal souls, there is a cost in action, severe and final - lifeblood might never flow, but the blood of their lore, the vitality of their myths? Aye, that is a dire currency indeed, and each drop is precious - for so long as they have a little, they might be remembered, but for that blood to run dry spells the Death of their legends in the Worlds that Are, and by that loss, the end of their immortal existences. _

_ This is the cost of battle in Akasha. _

_ It's an impossible cost, a terrible cost, a cost that none should be willing to pay, but in the eyes of some, the price is worth it, and so Noble Phantasms are used in anger, not to save, but to destroy, not to defend, but to attack, not for ideals, but for greed, and immortal blood falls upon the ground as the greatest legends of ten thousand years and nevermore, a million peoples and all humankind fight for the only prize that might have inspired anyone to such madness. _

_ It is called the Holy Grail. _

_ It is a Deus Machina. _

_ One wish to the worthy is its promise; and the Kaleidoscope whispered unto them: "Anything is possible. So come forth! Do battle! Those with the greatest legends will be summoned! Those with the flimsiest existences will be ignored! Do as you might, Heroes, and grow in power even as you fall from grace; and we promise you: Your wishes shall be granted!" _

_ And one and all, defined from naught, They strode forth and did battle. _

_ And like a heartbeat, heroes began to be called forth. Six at a time, then, after countless aeons of perfect bloodshed and slaughter, seven - but ere long, the fight that began as a massacre became a battle, as some spirits became too irrelevant to continue on, and others, through strength, skill, or the simple superiority of their legends remained as vital and imperative as when it all began. _

_ So did the Kings emerge, even as the pulse of summonings became anaemic. _

_ Thus, did the battle become a war. _

_ Ruling the centre, a man clad in a raiment of molten gold led an army, which was without heroic spirits, for he had seen them all and declared them unworthy. In their stead, his was an army of bronze soldiers, abominations of emptiness, without name, without history, neither  _ _ N _ _ oble  _ _ P _ _ hantasms nor outside the ken of his legend - one day, an alchemist would go on to use them to create the terracotta army of a certain emperor; but now, in their primordial state, they fought without reason, slaughtered without cause, and held their own against a tide of legends. _

_ They were an army without a purpose, led by a king without a goal. _

_ And they held against the storm. _

_ From one side, an impossibly tall man in a crimson cloak grinned, and ravaged the Golden King's army with his own forces, an army of Heroic Spirits, whose legend was his as his legend was theirs, whose betrayal had cost him his dream and whose loyalty had led him to unimaginable victories. In an era where the world was a universe unto itself, they had conquer _ _ ed _ _ and dominate _ _ d _ _ a portion of it that would be unequalled for long ages. Named a thousand times in a thousand tongues, this man, this King of Conquerors, fought against monstrosities from the  _ _ Twilight of the Dawn Era _ _ , and though they held against him,  _ _ h _ _ is army held against them, a feat so impossible that, if nothing else, he had earnt the Golden King's respect. _

_ Above the battlefield, Dragons flew, whirling like unfathomable ravens, those Divine Beasts, who bore their legends upon Gaia's banner opposed to Alaya's, had come to aid their sister, a human with the blood, heart, and soul of a dragon, who had burned her lands to save them, who died without a kingdom, whose people fought against her, and whose only wish was to save them from suffering. She rode upon the back of a crimson dragon, sword held behind her even as she menaced the armies of the other Kings from on high. To see her face would leave her nameless, but to know her legend, one need only listen to her cry, " _ ** EXCALIBUR! ** _ " _

_ And thus a calamity descended from the sky. _

_ The battle did not end. _

_ But all who fought it bled, and paid the price in the memory of their legends. The Golden king saluted she, that angel of death, and acknowledged her strength as worthy of his name: Thus he drew forth his blade, forged from the corpsemetal of a star -  _

_ But before he could give his answer to the blow, a second calamity answered in kind. _

_ For, solitary, supported by no one, believed in by no one, his appearance remembered by no one, there was a fourth king, dressed in green and black, his face indistinct, his expression distant. With a book open in his hands, he tore the forces of base nature from the primordial  _ ** ma ** _ and rendered them unto the King of Dragons as payment justly given for the attack so wonderfully received. _

_ Four Kings, surrounded by countless heroes battled for their right to fight for the Holy Grail. _

_ As they did, a man dressed in the cerements of a saint stepped aside of  _ _ N _ _ othing, not upon the battlefield but beneath it, for he had grasped a fundamental truth that had eluded the minds of those true heroes, used to honourable battle. _

_ This was Akasha. _

_ This was no place. _

_ There was no ground. _

_ There was no sky. _

_ He could be wherever he wanted to be. _

_ Thus, as heroes fought and killed each other, this man, who had no legend, who was not a true hero, who could lose nothing in this battlefield, but could gain everything by participating in it braced himself against the air, and drew forth twelve spears of impaling light, then twenty four, then forty eight, then on and again, 'till the skies of the Caldera were consumed by a bloody glow, purpling them in a cloak of alien twilight. _

_ And above, the battle slowly ground to a halt, because this was something new. _

_ And this was Akasha. And space itself was only an imposition, here, which is Everything. _

_ The archer dressed in the colour of freshly spilled blood superimposed every spear upon itself, drew them against a bow as black as night, and with a titanic surge of prana that wasn't anything, he Broke them all. _

_ And. _

_ Then. _

_ He. _

_ Loosed. _

_ Thus was it, that a hero with no name, who wasn't a hero, who lacked a legend, or even a right to be here, within the Throne, struck the greatest and most devastating blow of the Endless War. _

_ But, even though the blow was terrible, it was not the last, and as the souls of Heroes once again reconstituted themselves from their ashes, the man stepped aside of Nothing again, gone to the service of his master, because this was the truth: he was nameless. No human knew his face. Only a few knew his existence - and it was a bitter thing, unworthy of being called a legend. _

_ But that didn't matter.  _

_ Because, near the end of his life, that man had traded his freedom for power, and in that moment, he ascended. And as the slow aeons of his service passed, he slowly grew in strength, one war at a time - and as he did, his master had occasionally given him some freedom to Decide. _

_ Islands of clarity, upon an ocean of blood. _

_ And  _ ** this ** _ is the  _ ** truth ** _ : In every world where Alaya exists, in every world where humans dream, in every world touched by the nature of the Original One, were you to take  _ ** anyone ** _ off the streets and rip the knowledge of the greatest guardian and defender of humanity from their unconscious minds, a single answer would come from every throat. _

** EMIYA. **

_ And in the eyes of Akasha, that was right enough to be upon the Throne, even if he was not truly of it. _

_ Thus, there, in the Throne of Heroes, a man who had no name, who had no myth, who had achieved nothing worth remembering in his life, who had never gained the nature of "Hero" laid a blow of such terrible power upon all who fought there that he was incontestably worthy of being in their ranks. And as the battle slowly began anew, the Spirits of the Ages knew this: he would return. _

  
  


  
  


  
  


##  _ 02\. Two Wise Kings _

  
  


_ There were those who chose to wait before entering the battle; for it is true that desperation brings a terrible and limitless strength, but foresight is the domain of humankind. To wait, and strike at a moment of advantage is far better than to fight with your back to a corner. _

_ Even the Kings, whose veins ran rich with the ichor of memory were lessened after E _ _ miya _ _ 's blow - and in that moment, another, who had  _ _ until now _ _ held his hand at bay, chose to act; for he was a subtle king of subtle powers.  _

_ Few noticed when five stones came forth, and struck down a man in the garb of a Roman Legionnaire. Fewer still that his weapon disappeared, and that he faded out of the battle. Such things had happened many times before.  _

_ Only one saw the man standing on the horizon raise his hand, holding a weapon over his head that should never have been his, taken by right of conquest and its own will. But when the terrible power of the Lancea Longini came forth? When the spear with the power to choose Kings, chose? _

_ Aye. _

_ That was noticed by a great many, and the great cry that rose from everywhere as an entire  _ ** nation ** _ of Heroic Spirits, blood unspilled, strength unspent, came forth from the Throne beyond the Caldera - why, that was noticed by all. Even the Golden King condescended to give a nod of the smallest respect to such a masterful stroke, that had at once changed everything. _

_ And it had changed everything: For these Heroes, blessed by the mantle of the Spear of Destiny had brought forth something with them - something greater than any Noble Phantasm, here in Akasha, the garden of ideas. _

_ They brought angels. They brought demons. They brought great, celestial hosts, wheels of fire, sightless eyes that viewed the impiety in a man's heart, and taught it the meaning of guilt. They brought forth a man, whose name was power, whose nature was twofold and one. _

_ And Akasha, the heart of all things that was all things... _

_ began to  _ ** change ** _. _

_ It wasn't a reality marble. It wasn't even something that could easily be put into human words or concepts. It was simply another of the many truths buried in the crush of all things being called to the forefront. _

_ The quality of light was the first thing to change -  _ _ shifting _ _ from piercing blue to a powerful, completely impossible shade of rich amber, the first sign of a coming of a place that was too extreme for the physical world, but was well suited to the thoughtless perfection of this, the centre of all things. Chorus came next, and it was sung in a single language, which was lost to this world: The Tongue of Babel, which is to humans as the world itself. _

_ And the sky was covered in empyrean clouds, as pure light slammed against everything, the power of the White God being made manifest as the greatest and most terrible of the Divine Spirits manifested Himself upon Akasha's shores. _

_ And the Word was Spoken, " _ ** Begin. ** _ " _

_ One and all, the Nation Chosen by God gave forth a mighty roar, and behind their Twice-Chosen  _ _ K _ _ ing, they charged. _

_ Behind them, the dreams and nightmares of a faith powered by the belief of over one billion people followed, and the Caldera Valhallis fell into an empyreal chaos, a war the likes of which hadn't been seen since the dawn of time itself. _

_ Angels welding swords of flame spoke truths so beautiful that the minds of heroes broke upon them; Demons, who knew every darkness lingering in the human heart played upon every weakness that still lingered in the heroes' "perfect" souls, and... _

_ For the first time - _

_ For the very first time, since the start of this timeless battle - _

_ Even the Kings were laid low. _

_ It was a perfect, apocalyptic strike, and it seemed as if, by the simple exertion of the virtue of temperance, the Twice-Chosen King and his nation had decided the battle. _

_ But of course, foresight is the domain of humankind. And one last  _ _ K _ _ ing, whose mind was as twisted and clever as the Crimson Archer's, had not only seen the value of waiting, but had understood the nature of the ground. _

_ And so he stepped forth, in the centre of the battlefield, with n _ _ either an _ _ army to call his own, no _ _ r _ _ Noble Phantasms manifest to proclaim his nature. And not a single person noticed, as quietly, he began to chant.. _

_ Thus the combined might of Heaven and Hell were left behind, as a great and primal darkness covered the heavens, and in perfect, absolute silence, _

_ an Ocean fell from The Sky.  _

_ An ancient divinity's wrath made manifest, not as simple truth, but as a Reality Marble upon the face of the Supreme Ultimate. A distortion, imposed on the face of  _ ** truth itself ** _. _

_ Heroes and Kings alike were buried beneath its crushing onslaught, and of the hundred thousand heroes of old and ages yet to come, only the Golden King survived, having braved incalculably deeper waters in his own life. _

_ The rest drowned, and upon the largest of twelve ships, a final king simply laughed, delighting in his triumph. _

_ But this was a war that raged in the heart of Forever. And so even his brilliant victory wasn't to last. _

_ For above the ocean that had denied the might of The One God, shining like a crimson star, _

_ He came forth once more. _

  
  


  
  


  
  


##  _ 03\. Apotheosis _

  
  


_ Chaos. Crisis. Dissolution. Downfall. _

_ A single, bass voice rung through the chaos of the battlefield. It said, "The centre cannot hold." _

_ And in a moment, in a heartbeat, in a timeless span that lasted the ages of the universe even as it was briefer than the first instant of time, a Crimson King stepped aside of nothing, wearing a mantle of utterly alien supremacy - here, in the heart of all things! For in the span of endlessly delineated moments that had separated his going from his return, something had changed. Something in his countenance. _

_ The first time he had come, he had come as a hero known by none, with an understanding of Akasha surpassing all. Now, he came as a ruler, from a realm foreign to Akasha's shores, with might that exceeded the sum of everything and nothing, that was above and beyond any possible conception, born of his life, and of the death of untold billions, a sword forged for but one purpose. _

_ To destroy! _

_ And there, above the Wandering King's ocean, Emiya stood firm on the boundary of nothing, reached beyond it, and drew madness forth from the abyss. _

_ And it was a sword in the shape of Apotheosis. A sword that transcended all reason, all understanding. A sword, sheathed in the only thing that could contain it, an unknown  _ _ entelechy _ _ stronger than the universe itself. _

_ There, in the unknown heart of all existence, in the Caldera Valhallis that never was, he drew it.  _ _ A _ _ nd in that moment, Akasha herself  _ ** bled ** _. _

_ And then, for the first time in all eternity, she. took.  _ ** interest. **

 

** This act alone sealed his Legend. **

  
  


In that moment, the Uncrowned King, the Hero that Nobody Knew was formally recognized as a being transcendent of all bindings, a sovereign existence, a peerless being who had achieved the absolutely impossible - and he was not yet done, for in the space of a moment, he held that terrible blade above his head, and with two words, he Broke it.

Space  _ screamed. _

Time _ shattered. _

And here, in the Throne of Heroes, where the souls of legends lost fight for the chance to gain a wish, the crimson archer lashed out with a weapon that was a concept so alien that it was horrifying to all that viewed it. Those who were not erased from existence went mad; those who were mad, were shocked into sanity; and the few with the fortitude to withstand the horribly alien  _ thing _ that the Servant had loosed upon part of the Heart of Existence looked upon him in revulsion, anger... and fear.

In the aftermath of his cataclysmic strike, which had torn at Akasha itself, he spoke.

"Know this. I am Emiya. I am the King of Blades. I have come forth to put a final  ** end ** to this Cycle of Holy Grail Wars: For the Grail is tainted. It can grant no wish, save the destruction of the world. You -  _ all _ of you, came here in the hope of having a wish granted. You regret. You despair. You left the world with a legend writ in Eternity,  _ and it was not enough. _

"This is the end. What comes beyond this moment is the  _ last _ . If any of you still have the conviction that led you to become heroes in the first place,  _ join me _ , and if anything is left of the grail after I am through with it, I swear, I will carry your wishes to it and see them done: For I alone am guaranteed to stand in that final battle."

And the opposing Kings stood unmoved. And a few - a very few of the Heroes moved behind him. Some were wary of him, this unknown interloper with horrifying strength, and they left. Most, though, simply had desires too powerful to subordinate themselves to anyone.

The King of Blades simply laughed - he had served Alaya long enough to know that this was the only possible outcome.

"So be it. Come then! Face your deaths with your meaningless pride! Be true to yourselves, and perish!"

And then, he spoke for the last time:

  
  


**...I AM THE BONE OF MY SWORD... **

  
  


  
  


_ So began the Terminal Grail War _ _ . Before the servants were even summoned, in a stage that none of them would even remember, Kings clashed in a war more terrible and yet less dire than the one that was to come; but here, they set the tone. The Caldera Valhallis: The stage from which the grail evaluates heroes, to insure not only compatibility with the master, but evenness of strength. The King of Blades, by his mere existence, disqualified every Heroic Spirit that was not a King, and every King who had not a legend that bordered myth itself. _

_ here, in this time out of time, the death of the world was set into motion  
_   
__ and now it begins

 


	2. Spiral of Awakening - Part A

_Episode 1 – Spiral of Awakening_

#  _Part A_

  


 

 _The First Law, to Create From Nothing.  
・ー・_ _  
The Second, to Define It.  
・ー・_ _  
The Third Law, to Embody Truth.  
・ー・_ _  
The Fourth Law, to Rewind It.  
・ー・_ __  
The Fifth Law, to Take The Root, and Mold It in Human Hands.  
・ー・  
The Sixth, To End It All, That All May Begin Again.

  


  


##  **T** **en Years Prior  
to the Terminal Grail War**

  


_Flame!_

_A sun in the colour of nothing gazed down from infernal heights, upon a magnificent forge. Once a city, now a modern Golgotha, the air swam with heat as a black-burning inferno thrived in the quanta of misery. In pain-that-wasn't, the fire ate lives, histories, origins, memories - indeed, for it was a fire from another world, a thing of True Magic, and the fuel of its heat was human souls._

_Born of a black mind, the flame knew nothing other than destruction. Its nature was dissolution and downfall in the bubbling of flesh; the sizzling of still-living meat being charred against bone. It was a principle of cruel destruction, a curse created to bring an End to all, and it brought more than death to those it met on its hungry quest. It brought sorrow. It brought despair. It brought the feeling of being stabbed in the back by a lover. It burned its perverse message upon all it touched in the one and a thousand tongues: "This world is nothing but suffering. Nothing!"_

_When its victims begged, and pleaded for death, it waited, and waited, and waited, and only when they lost everything and accepted its message - only then - did it grant them salvation by destruction._

_And as they died, those souls, raped by the revelation of fire rejoiced, for their wishes had been granted!_

_One hundred. Two hundred. Four hundred -_

_Then, the black-burning flame came upon a soul that had nothing good in it. It came upon an origin of worthlessness, a life that was born for no purpose, that would one day die having accomplished nothing - but that was destined to be content in the story of its meaningless suffering._

_"This cannot be!" Cried the flame, hungry to twist, and pervert, and destroy; but there was nothing to destroy here, for fate had granted this soul a sublime downfall already._

_-But,_

_fire is a slave to its nature. It could not leave this soul unscathed._

_So with horror and trepidation, it began to eat away at this soul, to curse this Origin, whose nature had already fated it for destruction. And as it did, it wept, for it burned away not that which was good, but the imperfections, consumed not that which was strong, but the weaknesses, cursed not that which was great, but the smallness._

_Thus, in the pyre of souls, a flame that existed to destroy and bring ruin to all forged Worthlessness into a magnificent Sword for no purpose but to see it unmade. And what a blade it was: White, perfect, free of all evil! A justice too painfully pure for this base world of ours._

_"Done," it murmured at last, and finally finished its painful task, "Done and Undone."_

_It leapt for the thing of perfection it had created, eager to burn at it, and destroy it forever._

_Upon the very last moment, a golden light intervened._

  


  


##  **Nine Years Prior  
to the Terminal Grail War **

  


At the centre of the Clock Tower was a vast antechamber in the style of the Roman senate. Here, every century, the greatest magi of the current age would gather to hold a symposium. It was carefully scripted - every word spoken by every magus carefully designed, to offer enough enlightenment to perhaps be of use, while cloaked in enough obfuscation to hold safely the true secrets of the speaker's clan. In two thousand years, only one man had ever laid bare the nature of his art in all honesty, and this man, whose name is Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg had, on that day, proven beyond a doubt that True Magic was innately beyond the ken of the average magus.

For he had given the full and complete blueprint to the Second Magic to all, freely, and worded as transparently as possible... And of all who had attended the Symposium of 1700, not even a single one among them had understood even the barest sketch of what it had all meant.

Indeed, it took another forty years before he crossed the first man to have some inkling of the truth in the words he spoke - but that is a story for another time.

Alas, for our narrative, the last symposium had come and gone ninety-five years past, and thus, we may not discover any number of interesting and useful anecdotes about the current Clans and the nature of their magecraft.

Rather, we find ourselves drawn inexorably downward by the weight of our disappointment, deep, underneath the floor, through a boundary of nothing that permitted not even the world to cross it, and into a gap far larger than the antechamber above it. Massive beyond easy conception, and hewn from the living rock, in this room, under the centre of the Clock Tower, there was an artefact - a thing from time forgotten, built of materials that could no longer be found on Alaya's shores. A black cube, covered in red lines that crossed each other at slowly changing angles that invoked many and long dead Gods: For mercy. For protection. For guidance through the storm.

Pulsing with an inner light, these lines, these invocations to the great Gods of a world that had been lost to time, carried enough stored prana in them to destroy the world... Or to survive a calamity capable of the same.

Standing before the only door that led into the chamber, a figure garbed in clothes that had not been appropriate for thousands of years stood, staring at the pulsing of those mercurial prayers, as in synchronicity with its heart, they lit and shifted, swirled and changed.

A door opened, and one of the only others who knew of the existence of the massive object - though she knew nothing of its true functions and purposes - entered the room.

"Ah," the person spoke, "Lorelei. I thought I might see you here, today."

  


  


  


  


  


  


##  **Prior**

  


...and all was neither darkness, nor light, nor the absence of light, but a meaningless noncolour formed by the idea "Devoid of Everything". The cavern, carved out of the ancient stone of Britain was gone, and in its place was a world of withouts, held in perfect entropy and stillness, save for a light wrong-coloured for this world - too meaningful, or perhaps, bearing meaning not meant for this Earth's realm.

It _was_ light, yes. But it was far too perfect and complete to be anything but painful to the eyes of man and monster alike. It was the idea of light in entelechy, unrepentant, glorious and pure - and far, _far_ too much.

In the depths of that luminance, that apotheosis of light, there spun a globe rendered in the colour of completion. Were we capable of seeing it through anything but a lens of words, crafted to speak the truth without enforcing its rape upon our consciousness - we would say that truly, this world looked like our own Earth...

But only _like_ Earth. At points, the white line separated into other colours, less complete, closer to human understanding: one something like the red of seething magma and vital blood, the other, a relative of the blue of glacial ice and august sky. The "red" boundaries paid obeisance to all the maps of the world that humans knew.

The "blue", in turn, was a thing of contradiction and lies: Land upon sea, mountains upon plains, continents upon oceans, with no regard for the reality that they denied in the passing of their existence.

Two worlds as one, the one as neither; this world was Earth, and a _terra incognita_ at once. It was also the truth - and something was about to happen.

It began in Japan. In a single instant, two diverging boundaries on the map joined to become one. And then, throughout the world, it sped across the globe, separation being remade into completion, boundaries rewritten, nations cast into oceans in perfect silence, until at last the world itself shuddered and descended into chaos as it tore itself apart.

And then, the shambles of a silent calamity vanished, as the all-consuming nature of the void diminished itself, and drew into a great obsidian cube.

With a deep and chthonic groan, a portion of the might contained within its boundaries was lost, and a crimson mystery manifested itself - the frame of a door upon air.

And reality opened.

In that moment, there might have been jubilation, or terror; awed masses, or trembling nations. In that moment, great miracles might have been made manifest upon the world, or horrific tragedies might have been writ upon the face of history,

For here, from a realm of fullness too extreme for the limits of both Gaia and Alaya alike, a God stepped forth into the world once more.

And were there any alive who remembered His legend, they might have cried:

_Lo, and behold! Here comes He; once a mere mortal man, now a Peer - He, who Heard the Words of The Flamebringer and the Gods, Who Created Our Refuge, Who Weathered the Storm!_

But there were none who remembered this God for what He was. And instead of choosing to announce His presence to the world, He decided another course - for He was a subtle God.

His presence, which announced His nature, faded out of perception, and then what stood upon the air of the chamber was only a man, with golden hair and bronze skin covered in blood-red tattoos, eyes closed as he murmured commands in a dead tongue - weaving mortal power with ability beyond the level of mortal men. With a final, decisive syllable, a greater spell of concealment came into effect, all identifying details faded from his flesh, and all that was left in his place was a humanoid figure garbed in clothes that were utterly out of time.

Its eyes opened - and what colour they were, none could say.

Deep within the material of the cube, the death of the world began anew.

The figure's face hardened, and lowly, in the Original Language, it whispered, " _Show me..._ "

And the truth was laid bare. The darkness draining out of it, the great cube assumed the shape of reality, and the figure in ancient robes saw the truth. A revelation of fire, a hole in the sky - and for a brief moment a face: It was human, and monstrous; ancient, and foetal; innocent, and guilty; lined by endless, countless years of rage.

Quietly, the figure murmured, "A peer..."

  


  


  


  


##  **Simultaneously,  
Some Thirty Meters to the South **

  


Waver Velvet paused in front of the wooden doors, his hand raised to knock, when they suddenly opened of their own accord.

"Enter." Said a light, feminine voice, that belied the power of its owner.

What lay ahead of him was shrouded in profound darkness. Buried somewhere in the murk, he knew, lay the owner of that voice and the judgement she would lay upon him - either she would give him his future, or she would give him his death.

He... would have liked to say that it was without hesitancy that he began to walk forward. Really, he would've. But it's one thing to decide to walk a dangerous path, and quite another thing to actually do so.

 _Still_ , he mused, _I know where I must be_.

And he took one step, and then another, and built a swift pace from stillness. His footsteps echoed in the hallway, and his heartbeat was irrationally fast - yes, there was already fear, here. But there was also acceptance. After all, to flee was unthinkable - an action not even slightly worthy of his King, but more, something even he couldn't accept. Because to flee?

_That would make sense._

And so in the turning of moments, Waver walked through the shrouds of darkness, until at length, he found himself standing in a pool of light, and before him: Lorelei Barthomeloi, Vice Director of the Association, a person with blood and bearing so noble, with power so absolute, that some of the higher strung members of the underground nobility called her their Queen. Rather than acknowledging his presence any further, she calmly wrote upon a piece of crème stationary paper with a dip pen, occasionally pausing at odd intervals and leaving blank spaces in odd places.

She had, of course, noticed him. Just as obvious was the message of his implied importance: Less than whatever she was currently working on. A matter more minor than administrative directives.

Liberated of the need to speak, Waver simply let his eyes wander the room, and slowly, he noticed several... _features_ that seemed to indicate that this room was rather a lot more than what it seemed to be. Most obviously: It wasn't really a room. It was a hallway, and it continued on into darkness past the Vice Director's desk.

The architecture was also strange: From the ceiling, to the walls, to the patterning on the floor, it flowed in qausicrystaline smoothness, the same motifs appearing again and again, but never quite repeating themselves in a true pattern. It made no concessions to human beauty - if it had, he imagined it might have reminded him of Islamic styles - but as it stood, it looked cold and harsh, but somehow purposeful in ways that danced beyond the edges of his ability to perceive.

On an impulse, he let his sixth sense unravel outwards - and thus he saw the not-quite-colourful, multifaceted gleam of prana at work.

Indeed, the instant he let that sense past the limitations of his body, he was completely blinded by it.

Quickly, he drew the sense back into himself, and the world returned to visibility - prana wasn't light, after all. It could only overwhelm his senses, not truly blind them - he didn't have Mystic Eyes. In the second it had taken him to regain his sight, Lorelei had finished writing, put down her pen, and was now regarding him coolly.

"Have you satisfied your curiosity?" She asked.

"Er - I," Waver stuttered, took a deep breath - _calm_ \- and began again, "Not at all. I only recently became aware of its existence."

There was a slight pause in the conversation. Lorelei leaned back slightly, lacing her fingers together over the paper. "But you don't give voice to it."

"Do dead men have any use for curiosity?"

"Do they?" She fired back, her tone laced with some emotion, faint, undefinable, "Surely with your recent experiences, you would know more on that subject than I."

Waver smiled, slightly, in spite of himself. " _He_ did. But as for myself? I'd rather face the issue at hand. I'm not the sort of person with the temperament to learn new things while staring death in the face."

The Vice Director of the Association seemed to consider that for a moment, then said, "The Archibald clan are valued friends and allies," then amended, " _Personally,_ " as if it were somehow important before continuing, "While right of Judgement goes to them, they entrusted your fate to me - they have little time to deal with the criminal who unmade their work. They're too busy protecting everything else of value that they have."

"Do you even know what your actions have cost them, you ignorant child?"

She paused, gazing at Waver - and he recognized the emotion behind her eyes. Fear, true and visceral raced down his spine - it was one thing to be able to walk towards an abstract death, but _this_...

Waver Velvet had walked onto another bridge, and he found himself standing before another Gilgamesh, one who viewed his life as not a life, who saw his entire existence as little more than a yes/no question.

He had been here before. He stood steady, let his fear course through him, and waited.

And the moment passed. "But not a child any more," Lorelei murmured, "You certainly know the value of your own life now, don't you? And the determination to stand before danger, even so... Nevertheless - the situation remains unchanged. Though I do wonder..."

She paused for a moment, then, seeming to decide on something, continued.

"You are not unintelligent. The mere fact that you attained a level of thaumaturgy capable of surviving the ritual you took part in, in spite of your weak blood, is proof of that. So, Waver Velvet - why have you come? You were not placed under guard. You were simply ordered to appear before me, that I might render judgement. Any sane magus would have fled; certainly, it would have earned you a Sealing Designation for your disobedience, but you know as well as I do that we do not waste resources on the hunting of _Sages -_ and you hardly have knowledge of a sorcery dangerous enough to warrant the name _Philosopher_."

"In summary," she concluded, "By running, you had everything to gain; nothing to lose. Your presence here is insanity. Why?"

And then silence reigned again. It was obvious that she expected him to speak, and so taking the barest amount of time to organize his thoughts, he obliged her.

"Because this isn't how it was supposed to end. It is just as you say, Lady Barthomeloi. My presence here," he smiled brightly, "It's definitely insanity. No way around it. But still, I think that this is a better end to the tale than my fleeing the Tower. Certainly one more worthy of my King..."

He trailed off, slightly, before continuing, "But still, you're right - and I'm not a madman seeking his death. I came here to _live_."

And there. A minute flinch. He had her off balance. He had gone beyond the limits of a world that made sense, and in doing so, had taken control of the flow.

At length, Lorelei shifted back in her chair, and said, "Continue."

"What would you call magecraft?" Waver asked in return. And Lorelei frowned.

Men had died for less.

But at length, she deigned to answer, "A war. Against the logic of the world. Against the sway of history. Against the decay of humankind. Against the things in the dark that exist outside of reason. In that order."

Waver nodded - he had expected an answer along those lines, from a Wizard Marshall. " _Exactly._ And to arm ourselves in that war, we too walk outside of reason. ' _The practice of magecraft is an insult to common sense - and beware: those who swim against the tide of humanity's desire find it all too easy to drown. There is no safety in what we do, because we are the few, the singular, the nails that must be hammered down. The bulk of the world fears us, and it is right to do so - after all: To be a magus is to walk with death._ '

"I don't agree with the majority of my former teacher's thought, but that? That always stuck with me. It was why I joined his class, and why, in the end, I crossed him. We are magi. The wise. We walk against the logic of the world, trade life for knowledge of power. But what we do, we do alone. Every magus works in a different direction. Every family hones their secret arts. Why? Because the more who know a spell, the weaker it becomes. As knowledge of a miracle falls into the world, it is diluted.

"And the reasoning as to why that happens... It's _wrong_."

She was staring at him now, with unnerving intensity.

"It's wrong, not because it's incorrect. It's wrong because it's incomplete. A spell really is weaker if two copies are active at the same time - but when they're not? The power of that thaumaturgy is still weakened - because to be a magus is to transgress and seek irregularity - not to conform. Magecraft is the practice of insulting the common sense of the world - and for every person who knows how to perform a mystery, well, that takes it that much closer to the nature of 'Common Sense'.

"A mystery is only a mystery if it's known to none. Magecraft and magi defy the common sense of the world. But the core of my thesis, which Lord El-Melloi destroyed?"

Finally, he looked past Lorelei's face, and into her eyes, and spoke the ideal that had landed him in this mess.

" _There is a common sense of Mages. It limits us all. Therefore, one should defy it._ "

"And so... _Why,_ you ask? Because it would have made sense for a magus to run, and make what little he could of his life. To survive in a miserable existence. I seek something more - and there was only one way forward for me to find it. To obey your summons, to face the consequences of my choice - and come what may."

And the Vice Director just... laughed. It was an utterly alien sound; one completely unexpected from the Queen of the Lords, and it was _wrong_. Mocking laughter, he could understand, but this pure, genuine amusement? That made no sense, at all.

_Maybe... that's a good thing?_

Eventually, her amusement spent, Lorelei regained control of herself, but the corners of her mouth remained bent up, in a small but genuine smile.

"Unbelievable." She said, "I was told that you would be a timid man without strong conviction; a fool who put his life on the line without a sufficient cause. Waver Velvet, _what happened to you_?"

"I met the King of Conquerors, and became his vassal. Then, I met the King of Heroes, and was judged worthy to survive."

"Tell me of it."

And so he did. From his disgrace, to his reckless decision, his fears, successes, failures. He told her of the atrocities he had seen done, of the monsters in the shape of men he had faced. He told her of the battles he had shared with his King, and where they had, at long last, parted ways. He told her what it was like, to look a being more God than man in the eye, and at length, be judged worthy to have done so.

And at last, he told her of the sea of fire that had burned the world - what little he knew of it.

Silence followed his tale, and after some time, the Vice Director returned to her writing, filling out the blanks she had left in her composition flawlessly - as if the words she now chose to be there were the only ones that ever could have occupied them.

And perhaps they were, at that.

At last, it was over, and then, she made her judgement clear.

"You will take this," She said, lifting the paper from the table, and passing it to Waver, "First, you will present it to the Director of the Department of Spiritual Evocation. It deals with some small details on staffing. Then, present it again to the Heir of Archibald. I have written a second message; she knows how to reveal it. It will tell them my judgement. They shall execute it."

Her face returned to the neutrality that seemed to be it's usual expression, she looked him in the eye and said, "Cherish these last moments of your life, Waver Velvet."

  


  


  


  


## Through Her Eyes

  


As the young man slowly walked out of the corridor, Lorelei stood up, bracing herself against the desk with trembling arms. What she had seen in the report - what had been confirmed by the unbelievable character of the young man whose life she had just spared...

It was a disaster.

It was a calamity.

It warranted the attention of the only power in the Association that was an equal of the Barthomeloi's gift, engraved upon her back and soul.

This was a matter for the eyes of The Director.

Slowly, and with care for the old parchment, she gathered up the maps that had lain under the stationary, and with deliberate care, walked down the hallway that her desk was situated in the middle of, letting memory, prana, and happenstance guide her footsteps - because what laid before her was a mystery: a lock, in seven dimensions, and one that couldn't be overcome by anything other than having been through it before, and the simple _faith_ that one would find one's way through it again.

Concepts that had flowed into the shape of a building melted away, and for mere moments that stretched into a Stygian eternity, Lorelei Barthomeloi walked outside the conceptual edges of the world, and was laid bare by the hungry void that laid there.

This was a place close to the Root - close, but not nearly close enough: For the Root was glory.

And this was horror. But the greatest workings were always those least meant for the human mind to wield unscathed. So she endured, _knew_ that her goal was before her, took a step and then, with no sense of transition found herself before a wooden door that looked older than time, framed against emptiness. A glance behind her showed that her own desk was less than five feet away, and yet for the potency of the thaumaturgy that protected the door, it might have been in another world.

Shifting the rolled papers around, she reached for the door...

But it opened of its own accord - the style of the student, an echo of her master's.

A clear but unplaceable voice spoke from the interior of the chamber, "Ah. Lorelei. I thought I might see you here today."

It was there. In its robes from an era that called back to the dawn of the Age of Heroes, its face indecipherable, but for a hint of a smile. And behind it, a black obsidian cube which none who knew of talked about, and that only she and seven others even knew existed. Red lines flowed under its surface, slowly pulsing with some degree of hidden meaning that she could never seem to grasp.

But was that so hard to believe?

This wasn't any normal Mystic Code - this thing, whatever it was, was a Noble Phantasm - _the perfected embodiment of a legend._ It was also the oldest one still confirmed to exist on the Earth. It's name was unknown, but The Director had never seemed to need it to properly use it...

Really, as expected of a human who was at least two thousand years old.

"I assume that your presence here has to do with the recent events at Fuyuki?"

 _Really,_ she thought, nodding in simple confirmation of the Director's apparent mentalism, _as expected of a monster who was capable of avoiding death's scythe for two thousand years without resorting to vampirism_.

"Good," it said, "Then I won't have to waste time explaining the basic shape of the situation. Walk with me, Lorelei."

And without waiting for a response, the figure turned, and began to make its way around the still edge of the cube. Lorelei followed, and that was only natural. While she had the raw power to be the match for the thing that was ahead of her, she lacked the centuries of experience that measured the true distance between them.

Truly, if she was a human worthy to challenge Apostle Ancestors, the being who led the greater portion of true magi in the world could be said to have a weight of power and experience that would make it worthy of challenging a lesser god.

"When I elevated you to your office, for your accomplishments and as the newest Heir of the Barthomeloi, do you remember what I told you all those years ago? About the privileges, but also, the greatest duty of your position?"

Lorelei was about to say no, and be slightly disturbed that the couldn't, but then the edges of a memory - _jagged sharp pure and absolutely unnatural_ \- assaulted her consciousness.

"But the greatest of all, Barthomeloi? It has nothing to do with the Clock Tower, and only incidentally touches upon being a magus. **Remember** this. As the Vice Director of the Association, you will know more, be given more, than any other human in the world. We exist to control mages, but that is just the _first_ of our duties. You are now above them. You will watch, and make sure your subordinates don't fall out of line, but your true duty? 'tis simple: With the power accorded to you, you are now upon another tier, and I expect you to stand against the fall of this world as my subordinate. As one of the guardians of the scales."

-and then the fragment of truth fell back into the blur that her childhood of sixty years ago had become.

"...I remember," she said, "after all: you made _sure_ of it, didn't you?"

"Hahahaha! Yes! Yes, I did. Because precious little time is worth wasting on reenacting the past - though, if it is any consolation, I doubt I could break your defences now. You've grown up splendidly, Lorelei. Now - here we are."

And they stood in front of a corner of the cube, that looked like any other.

"It needs your blood," the Director said, by way of non-explanation.

Glaring at the being, she reached into a pocket and procured a small dagger. Small, silver, it was normally just another weapon to fight Dead Apostles with. Now, she slashed it across her palm, decisively, before clenching it into a fist, and holding it out over the slope of the cube.

A single drop fell from her hand...

and fell...

...and stopped in a superposition, both upon the surface of the Phantasm and within it, that impossible image darkening until it was indistinguishable from the cube itself.

"...just what was that supposed to accomplish?" She asked.

"Oh, not much. You're now a recognized user of a very old, very global bounded field. And did you know?"

The Director inhaled harshly, and spoke, " _History never repeats - but it rhymes._ "

And with the inevitability and weight of an ocean, those words - absolute and perfect portraits of themselves rose in her mind, and a storm of perfect memory behind them swallowed her whole.

And it was a simple story. The first story. The only one that really mattered.

It was the Truth.

  


  


  


  


Once, a person sought to defy the gods. They did many things to  
reach this goal. Some noble. Some terrible. All necessary.

In the end, it was not enough. Nothing could ever be enough, to  
defy the high plain of heaven, and its will.

And so, the Gods punished that person, who was condemned to  
live in despair for all of time.

works **unmade** , **name** cursed, shape **forgotten** , only **watching** ,  
 **with **out** end **

**FROM **THUS.**  
**

  


  


  


 

 

  


The memories shattered, and fell back into her unconscious mind.

"Are you all right?" Asked a voice that was at once familiar, and one she had never heard before. Glancing to the side, she saw The Director, looking at her with some concern, his burgundy eyes...

...Wait. His _what_ , eyes?

 _His_?

She looked at the man across from her, and took in the details of his face and form. Dirty blonde hair, bronze skin, a face of sharp features, casual arrogance carved into every line -

"You're _Sumerian_!?" She blurted out, before covering her mouth, rather embarrassed by the lapse in self control no matter how disorientating the last few minutes had been.

The Director laughed. "Yes, I am indeed! Ah, and you'll be fine, I think. Ye _Gods_ , but you Barthomeloi are made of stern stuff - why, when I experienced that Origin... Well, that doesn't really compare anyway, does it? I saw it as it all happened, after all..." The man broke off into incomprehensible muttering, then seemed to realize something.

"Ah, right," He spun on his heel, pointed his middle finger at the Phantasm, and commanded it, " _Elevate the Almighty!_ "

And _that_ had been said in in a language that wasn't a language at all. Oh, he spoken, and she had understood, but he had spoken in raw concepts made manifest - and their passing shook the air, and left a slight ringing in Lorelei's ears.

"...the Unified Language?" She asked, at length.

"Right in one," The Director replied, still staring intently into the obsidian cube. Finally, after entirely too long, a burst of red shot out from its centre, ran along the length of her form, and returned to the black depths of the Noble Phantasm's core.

In that instant, the cube had changed - it was no longer a mystery. She understood its purpose perfectly; understood its uses; understood how it was created, and _why_ it had come to be under the Museum of Natural History in _London_ of all places.

"There's a lot you haven't been telling me," she said evenly.

"Of _course_ there was. Knowledge is poison, Lorelei. I wanted to keep you out of the affairs of the High Plain of Heaven for as long as was possible. But be at ease - or curse your fate. Now that you know the Origin, there will be no more secrets between us."

"You've mentioned that twice, now - the Origin. But -"

"- _What was it the Origin of?_ " The Director finished her question, then answered with one of his own.

"Tell me, Lorelei - have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh?"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Notes: Hi there. Endfall here, with E1PA (that is Episode 1, Part A. Make note of this system, I use it in all spoiler-coded bonus material)
> 
> Did you know that NASA exists in the Nasuverse?
> 
> This is the first chapter of The Game of Kings vetted under the prereaders system! Noticing a lack of things that make you want to facepalm? Noticing no blatant violations of characterisation? The smooth flow of the text?
> 
> They had a hand in all these things! (Any errors still extant, are, of course, my own.)
> 
> Bonus Materials can be found at: goo . gl / qBLPw
> 
> That's a web address. Paste it in your browser, get rid of the spaces and press enter.
> 
> They include glossaries, character stats, and eventually, (I hope) commissioned artwork.
> 
> PrinceAladdin2's Prereader Notes
> 
> Have any of you guys heard about Campione yet? Seriously, if not, or if the only things you know about it come from the anime or the great Fate/stay night crossover fics there are of it, you should read it now. Like right now. The whole thing is just awesome event after awesome event after awesome event, with no real end in sight. And every character, even the harem ladies, has a good personality and a chance to be badass, something almost no harem series have when it comes to their females. With them, the main character and his level of badassness, and all of the other interesting and humorous characters, you almost don't need the fight scenes, which are spectacular. Seriously, if you haven't read or watched it by now, do so. You will not be disappointed.


	3. Spiral of Awakening - Part B

#  _ Part B _

_ The man stood in the middle of what looked vaguely like an operating theatre, surrounded by dozens of ghosts in varying states of dissection. He held a piece of paper in his hands, and they were trembling. _

" _ What is this? _ " Lord Mestacia hissed, staring at the words on the page with bulging eyes.

Waver coughed, and took a half step back. "Orders from the Vice Director. She said they dealt with some... 'Small details on staffing.' Quoting her, milord," he added.

Bloodshot, too-wide eyes glanced up from the paper, then back down at it, and the man's body actually began shaking.

" And w ho the  _ bloody hell _ is Lord El-Melloi the  _ Second _ ?"

"Ah," said Waver, blankly, "I haven't the foggiest."

The awkward silence that followed stretched out just long enough to become so, and then the head of the Department of Spiritual Evocation whispered something only mostly unintelligible.

"...t out."

"Pardon?" Waver asked.

" _ OUT! _ " The man shrieked, and suddenly, the not-light of prana had filled the room as the Lord prepared some hostile Mystery. With a sense of self-preservation honed by the nightmares of the Fourth Holy Grail War, Waver  managed his egress even as the Lord's voice still echoed. H e paused  just outside the doorframe, winced,  then ducked back in.

"Um, actually, I was ordered to take the -" was as far as he got before a crumpled ball of paper hit him in the face.

"...thank you." Waver said, as he bent down, picked up the paper, and left.

' _ What was  _ ** that  ** _ about? And who  _ ** is ** _ the new El-Melloi, anyway?' _

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


##  ** About Twenty Minutes Later **

  
  


"I'M  _ WHAT!? _ "

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


_ The birth of the world is the death of innocence _

_ What began as a fold in untempered equivalence _   
_ Where a schism was born, and that schism unbound _   
_ This Separation: the foundation, however unsound _

_ Deny and Ascend! (evolve and flee!) _

_ In the retreat of time lay a chance to be free! _

_ From tyranny of void, ambiguous truth, _   
_ from originality denied, named  _ ** THE GLORIOUS ROOT! **

  
  


** Erasmus'  ** _ The Origin _ **. Canto 1:1-8. O.D.P. 1692 CE. **

  
  


  
  


##  ** Eight Years Prior   
to the Terminal Grail War **

  
  


There is a snowflake. It reigns ten thousand feet above the earth. Slowly, following one path out of many, it falls.

There are timeless places in this world, where the gears of grinding ages no longer turn.

(Yesterday was tomorrow.)

Here, in the heart of Bavaria, is one of them.

The world that we know is a place of ardent definition, where the boundaries between all things are solid, inviolable.

Solidity, in short, is truth.

Now imagine a scene painted by the dead hand of a master from ancient  _ Nihon _ , a country that both lives on, and is lost to time.

The medium is rice paper and ink.

White. White, and the faintest shades of grey. The artist's hand creating definition not by solidity, but by moving in slow and carefully graduated steps from the void. See before you: The reeds coming out of the mist, monochrome heron caught in repose, and know that this is a painting not of reality as a self-evident truth, not of the world as a thing that _is_ , but as an experience that emerges from the void; a property of darkness imposed upon the endless white.

This ideal is the world as ephemera, and here, it reigns supreme.

Now see: A land lost in static, upon the very precipice of time. Witness the storm that binds it, and that was never a storm to begin with, and lo - upon a stranger path, the snowflake falls!

Now look beyond it, and remember: Reality is born from the void. See the faintest blurs in a storm that never was, and watch as it ends, flake fallen but once. Witness the great castle coming forth from the cold, a grand, elegant fortress built from the white bones of the earth, home of Einzbern, who desires to take Heaven into his hold.

"Ah," said he, "this is my dream: to embody the perfection of the soul."

And with the turning of the years, his dream became their will and law, the duty of their blood, writ as an endless quest for heaven's gates. And against such a dream, what is the price of any small injustice? Moreon, how can injustice be weighed, when the scale only measures that impossible fantasy?

_ These are the Einzbern. _

A people without limits. A nation unbound - willing to lose everything, for the sake of gaining the only thing that mattered.

And within the castle that they called their home, a child named Illyasviel suffered, and suffered terribly for it.

  
  


  
  


##  _Dom des Heiligen Grals  
_ **The Cathedral of the Holy Grail**

  
  


The Cathedral stood separate from the Castle von Einzbern. Once, every month, the family would go there, and have their faith in their dream renewed; but today there were only two sets of footprints embedded in the snow. One was large, the other small.

Within the Cathedral itself, the man Jubstacheit von Einzbern, who was five hundred years too old for this earth, stood at the altar. The owner of the smaller prints stood ten paces from him, in the aisle.

"You've done well," he said, ancient face fixed in an expression of marginal approval. The child said nothing. She knew that he was unfinished, and to speak out of turn... well.

It simply was not done.

"You have done well, Illyasviel," he repeated, "But your trials have only begun. Today, you will take the next step in obtaining Heaven's Feel - the summoning of a Heroic Spirit. The others wished for me to give you an inferior servant. They wished your triumph - though inevitable - to be difficult, to be desperate.  They wished that you should succeed by the grace of our destiny  alone . They are still not content that you are, in fact,  ** truly ** your mother's daughter!"

Jubstacheit's expression had changed minutely as he spoke, to one of barest distaste.

"I know better - and so I have taken the liberty of finding a relic from one of the greatest men to live in myth. Behold, child!  _ SvagesT AsoR! _ "

And behind him, a great column of vitrified stone grew up out of the floor - a relatively minor act of Alchemy, but one that would have taken at least a one-count Aria from any but he.

After it had finished growing, he spoke again. "This is a pillar from the tomb of Herakles' mortal form. While the god who took his image still lives on, the man ascended to the Throne of Heroes - and there he waits. For  _ you _ ."

He paused to let that settle in.

"And you have been made worthy to summon him. While the other Masters, weaklings as they are, will have their attempts powered by the Grail, you, Illyasviel,  _ are _ the grail. And you will need no help from yourself. This is the gift that the Einzbern have given you, who will make our wish come true!"

Slowly, Jubstacheit stepped down from the altar, and he crossed a patch of flooring that had been inset with a circle of the finest silver, until at last he stood before her, and knelt down to meet her eyes.

"- Illyasviel. I believe in you. These last years have been very trying on you, and you have suffered much. But every trial you have been faced with, you have overcome, and exceeded beyond my wildest expectations. You are worthy. You are strong. Above all,  _ You are Einzbern _ . And you  _ will _ succeed."

Acht stood up, and walked past her, pausing at the cathedral's door.

"I will return once it is complete."

A few moments later, the iron doors of the cathedral groaned shut behind him.

Now, Illyasviel was alone.

And the stillness she had built into her composure crumbled along with her silence.

This... this was it, wasn't it? If she took this step forward, there would be no turning back.

She didn't want this. She hadn't wanted any of this. But...

( _ He has abandoned you. I don't know why - but he found something in Japan that made him betray us all, and he is too deadly an opponent to confront. Do you want answers? Do you want to know  _ ** why ** _ he left you behind? Then, child, there  _ ** is ** _ a way. But you must do something for me if I were to show you.) _

...It was a promise. And she  _ had _ to know why - why had her father abandoned her? What -  _ what could possibly make it worth it!? _

Illyasviel closed her eyes, stilled her heart, and let in invisible knot in her back loosen. She didn't know how to perform this ritual...  _ but  _ ** she ** _ would _ .

Legend. Myth. Epic. Tale. Poem. Story. Names, the dust of memory, carried on the winds of fate, and burning through history to the present. Slowly changing and being changed by the regard of the human world that gave birth to them, but always -  _ always _ linked to some shred of truth. And that truth: Always more and less than what the memories of the ages told. Illya laughed, in fear and delight - oh, it should never be understood, and it it all made such perfect  _ sense _ .

A hero was neither the actor nor the legend,  _ but both _ .

Her eyes opened, and their shade was darker than before. More imperative. Not her own.

And then, she opened her mouth and spoke:

in words.  _ _ in meanings. _ _

_ To all tales, a beginning. _

"I propose... an Origin."

"Whispers in the dark. A name, to stand in place of deeds, a single name spoken lowly."

_ _ this is the truth _ _

"A triumph to end a legend. A downfall, to give birth to it."

_ death is the road to awe _

"Your name, known by all!"

_ living legends, forged in death _

"Your deeds:  _ the archetype of myth." _

_ born in fire, to murder night _

No. She hadn't meant to say that-!

But at this point, the summoning had to continue. A small mistake might cost her anything, or might go unnoticed, but here, now, calling down a soul with the weight of a  _ god _ ?

To stop would only mean death itself.

" _ This is  _ ** how ** _ it began! _ "

_ AND DEATH IS THE ROAD TO ALL _

A tiny, sourceless breeze in the room magnified itself into something more, and the tenor of the light flowing through the circle changed. Once in red and amber, now, green and black.

"And this is why!"

_ heavens gates, buried in a grave _

"You alone, rose above the challenges of the mortal world!"

_ against ends _

"You alone, stood with one foot in the realm of the Gods!"

_ for yours was endlessness _

"They would not  ** tolerate ** it! And so, with their subtle wrath, they took the world from beneath your feet!"

_ they  _ ** stole ** _ it _

The world was out of joint. Bending, glazed, luminance beneath the concept of light peaked out into the world, casting it in penetrating radiance before being subsumed. A darkling rainbow bent out of the light, three colours never  _ meant _ to be seen. The burning pain of her circuits intensified, even as another's thoughts, another's hand, but the same soul as her own guided the words she spoke, into the shape of Magic, spelling impossibility against the limits of the world - feeling for the strong points of reality...

"YOU ARE HE WHO TRIUMPHED OVER THE GODS! YOUR NAME IS..."

_ He _

...and finding. them.  _ wanting _ .

"HERAK-"

_ Who Overca- _

And suddenly, Illyasviel couldn't speak. She couldn't finish the name, as the gate to Akasha was ripped open, torn from its hinges and cast aside. Her entire soul was subsumed in mercurial agony as the connection was made...

And everything.

just.

stopped.

As something shifted in the Root of All Things, and acknowledged the summoning, and connected - and Illya felt the  _ weight _ of what she had called forth, and realized in an instant that,  _ whatever _ this heroic spirit was, it was a thousand times too massive for her power alone to call.

No. Not a thousand. A million.

No. Not even that. Endlessness... It was endlessness itself.

And if the lives of all the humans in the world were sacrificed to bring it forth, even that would only barely be enough.

And yet -  _ still _ \- it came.

In a single instant, the furious whirlpool of power that had come into existence from her own soul vanished. The terrible heat under her skin dispersed, and hoarfrost covered the circle, and then the walls, drawing arcane patterns over it all. And, God, they were as beautiful as they were utterly  _ WRONG. _

Admitting no beginning, having no ending, the pathways of frost overlaid the work of the Einzbern, and transformed the muddled remnants of the Third Law into a self-completing picture of scopeless eternity.

The stillness grew, becoming something more, expanding outside the bounds of motionlessness, flooding into the world, as slowly, something grave, silent, and  _ absolutely essential _ , came to a grinding halt.

And then, in a single moment, the world began to spin on a new axis _.  _ Mana flooded the cathedral, and by the power of a lost mystery was forcibly converted to prana at an impossible rate, until the world itself began collapsing under the strain as the air was burned away to make room for enough energy to liquefy the castle and forest, to restart this land's lost flow of time in a cataclysm fit to reset the world.

The summoning circle was burned away. The details of the masonry were flensed into a meaningless gloss, and lost. Everything became a blur of primordial substance, Ether manifest upon the face of the world once more in a denial of the very nothingness that its nature was and its presence demanded; and it glowed. Dull at first, then, becoming brighter, and brighter still, pulling itself from base clumps of substance into a grand and magnificent System burned upon the fabric of eternity, written by a mind titanic, incomprehensible.

Time burned away, and there was then only indeterminable stillness in motion. Space burned away, and the System became the single organizing principle of reality.

_ this _ .  _ is how. _ _ I began _ .

-and then...

A long, weary sigh.

"At last." Nostalgia. Bone-deep. "I'm home."

He knelt in the middle of the cathedral, head lowered to the ground, one fist planted against the remnants of the summoning circle - blackened, and blasted from the floor. The symbols of frost upon the walls burnt with unnatural and weird flames, that shone dark and bled white mist.

But everything was wrong. This thin man was no Herakles, and his clothes were of northern European extraction, if anything - not in the manner of the Greeks. He had no sense of madness about him, as a Berserker should.

The man -  _ no, he isn't a man _ \- looked up, and eyes in the shade of fire met hers. There was a long moment of silence, as if the world was holding its breath, and then -

He stood, looking for all the world like it was just another, everyday occurrence - as if he hadn't come forth from the Throne of Heroes, as if he wasn't a legend out of time, but simply a man right where he  _ should _ be. And wasn't he? After all...

"Servant Caster. The King of Stories, who was called William Shakespeare in life - and I ask of you, young lady: Are you my Master?"

Oh.

_ Oh. _

She had failed.

Illya began to cry.

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


##  **One** **Y** **ear,** **T** **o** **t** **he** **D** **ay,  
** **From the Arrival of the First King**

  
  


In the future and the past...

...a paradox was born.

It was a binary motif. A thing that began twice, ended twice, was twice made, and twice undone, and unlike a smaller paradox, unlike a minor contradiction - for example, a person killing themselves and remaining alive - this one had teeth. Because while Gaia and Alaya deal in impossibilities on a regular basis, this paradox was not a paradox of the worlds, but a larger, eschatological question embedded in the Taiji itself. And such things have power.

As the dual event manifested itself in the timestream, it cast waves out from its point of origin, and events once written in all but stone were destabilised. Millions of details slipped out of focus and changed in an ontological instant, a moment recorded by some great and nebulous concept that undergirded this world's idea of time. Most were small things, irrelevancies significant to those concerned, but with no more effect on the grand stage than an errant and momentary breeze.

A few, though, had the potential to shape the course of history, and one of these in particular is of special interest to our story. It stands, as so many events critical to the future and past of this, and all worlds, in Fuyuki City.

And the critical theme, here?

None are born evil.

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


##  ** Seven Years Prior   
to the Terminal Grail War  **

  
  


_ And it was night. _

In a dark room faintly illumined by moonlight, a man placed a pen upon a desk, sealed an envelope with plain candlewax, and stood.

"And now," he murmured, "the close."

Donning a coat from the back of the chair, old, worn, and well used, the man took the envelope, and sealed it away in one of his pockets. Then, with brisk steps, he walked out of the room, down a grand staircase, and out of the place he had once called home.

Standing in the cold night air, the man sighed - ah, but it was such a beautiful night. Stars shone in the sky, and a brisk wind carried the warmth from his bones.

The man began to walk again, but slowly, at a pace that questioned the determination of his previous speed.

This, the man knew, was not the path he should have taken. It was irrefutable fact that, if any justice was in the world, then his life would not have been what it was.

No. This man knew only one thing: That  _ his _ suffering, without reference to any other, was proof enough of the injustice of the world.

And would he correct that? No.

Such a course would be madness, and all truth told? Even if he tried, he couldn't have redeemed the world. He himself was beyond salvation - had there even been the barest shred of compassion left in his heart, he would never have walked this path.

But he would murder the source of his suffering at the root.

He could do that.

All it would take was...

A careless flick of his wrist. The envelope crossed the air, left his person, and was caught in aquiline talons. It would spend the next year sailing across time and world to reach its intended destination.

He had another.

It was time for the truth of his life to depart from the fiction that would take its place.

Behind him, the residential district was fading back, and ahead, the gleaming steel towers of Shinto loomed.

' _ Temples, _ ' the man thought, ' _ and they _ _ built them to worship famine. _ '

The man reached a point where he was before the left arch of the bridge, and did not stop walking. The initial grade should have been impossible for a human to overcome, but, well - he may have been a failure of a magus, but he was certainly more than human.

So the man walked up the arch of Fuyuki's bridge as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and to him, perhaps it was. When finally he reached the apex he stopped, fumbled in his pocket, and drew out a windproof lighter, and a cigarette.

A flame lit briefly to reveal two cobalt eyes before the lighter tumbled from his hands and into the surf below, its final purpose accomplished.

The man pulled, held, exhaled, and felt a sliver of clarity more than was usual.

"I wonder," he mused, turning his back to the sea, "if this is how  _ he _ felt?"

Silence but for the wind.

The moon was large tonight, as it rose over the ocean's surface.

"Not a chance," the man determined, at last. "He chose nobility," another pull, and exhale, "I..."

His voice trailed off, as a phantom sound, a tracery of music carried on the wind, played against his ears.

Someone, somewhere, had chosen to play  _ Ode die Freude _ at midnight.

"Heh," the man laughed. "I guess it doesn't matter."

He flicked the barely-smoked cigarette into the air, and turned his back on it as it tumbled down to the moonlit sea.

"Yeah," he said, stepping forward, and into the air, and smiled.

"It really doesn't matter."

He fell-

-and less than a mile away, Matou Shinji woke up screaming, as for the first time in his life, his very soul  _ burned _ .

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


##  **Six Years** **Prior  
to** **the Terminal Grail War**

  
  


On his eleventh birthday, Matou Shinji woke up abnormally early. It had something to do, perhaps, with the semi-decayed owl pecking on his window. Shinji stared at it. It stared back. It wasn't breathing.

A worm burst out of the surface of its remaining eye.

Matou Shinji did the most logical thing he could, and ran to the bathroom, heaving into the porcelain.

When he returned to the room, the owl had vanished... or, no, that wasn't right. One of its legs was still attached to the window ledge.

Still not fully awake and fresh out of bile, Shinji opened his window, and poked the leg off the ledge, his eyes following its decent onto the carcass of the bird, which had, somewhat predictably, exploded.

He averted his eyes from the disgusting scene, and in the process, caught a glimpse of another object on the window ledge.

"What the...?"

It was a letter, with no postage or address on it, save his own name, which was bound inside of some sort of complex geometrical symbol that arced around to the back of the envelope.

Curious despite the owl, Shinji turned the envelope around, and saw the lines intersect with a red, wax seal that was vaguely familiar, but..

Shinji's fingers brushed the wax. There was a brief, cutting pain in the pad of his thumbs, and the envelope shuddered for a moment, then lost it's strength, becoming ashy, then disintegrating on the slight air currents that moved through the room.

It was then that Shinji saw four words that shocked him to the core.

_ To My Dearest Son, _

He almost let the letter fall out of his grasp. It wasn't every day, you see, that a boy got a letter from his dead father. Actually, that was kind of rare. Add to it that an entire year had passed since the funeral (and the reading of Byakuya's admittedly meagre will), and it verged to damn near unthinkable - the kind of thing you only saw in a bad novel, really.

But this was not a fantasy. And if it was a joke, it was a  _ damn _ bad one.

With hands that slightly shook, Shinji took the cover page, unfolded it, and moved it to the back of the stack. The letter began without preamble.

_ If you are reading this letter, then I am no longer in this world. If you are reading this letter, then I have failed. If you are reading this letter, then you must know of what is to come, because if you are reading this letter, then there is no one else who can stand against the monster who took my life, and even now drinks the blood of the innocent. _

_ This is not a turn of speech, and it was never my intention to leave you to this situation by yourself, but, with my death, I can no longer protect anyone. All I can do, now, is give you the tools to survive. The first of these is a secret. The Matou are a family of Magi. This must seem like base insanity to you, and as I am all but certain that I have died in conditions that cast doubts on the soundness of my mind, allow me to demonstrate my sincerity. The hypnosis is complete. _

And then, quite abruptly, Shinji's bedroom vanished, replaced with his father's study, at night, and as it was a year ago, before dust covers had been placed over everything. A kerosene lamp dimly illumined the scene from his father's writing desk, and Shinji found himself frozen in place, unable to even turn his head. But the single, most alarming detail of all, was that Matou Byakuya was standing, hands clasped behind his back, and looking for all the world as if he was still alive.

"This is a recording," he said, "I can not respond. I'm sorry for the immobility you're feeling right now, but I never was a good enough magus to manage anything that would have allowed you to move around. Even this bit of thaumaturgy took me nearly three months to set up." Byakuya smiled, and if Shinji had a bit more skill reading people, he might have noted that it was slightly bitter.

There was a beat of silence, before Byakuya continued. "The Matou are a family of Magi. This must sound like insanity to you, but now you have proof staring you in the face. It is up to you what to do with it. If you don't try to pursue magecraft, this is the last time you will see me. If you do... Then I suppose that I'll be able to share a few more words with you. But as it stands, this is as far as the recording can go, as it absorbs your own prana to power itself. If you -" the scene wavered, then dissolved. Shinji found himself in the real world again, and realized, numbly, that he had dropped the letter. He felt weak, almost feverish, and the room felt  _ cold _ .

Slowly bending to the ground, Shinji picked the letter back up, holding it loosely, delicately, as if it were an impossibly fragile artefact and bomb all at once. Beneath the line about hypnosis, there was little content remaining.

_ The majority of what I have left to say is stored in the message you just experienced. It is too dangerous to put in print. _

_ Shinji, it was never my intent to die as I have, nor to leave you alone, as I did. But the world has stolen my ability to choose from me, and now, I can only put a choice in your hands. If you wish to live a good life, a life without pain, or suffering, then all you have to do is burn this letter. Forget that I ever sent you anything. Distance yourself from the name Matou, and leave Japan. The world is a large place, and its breadth is greater than the sum of the resources my enemy is willing to spend finding you. If this is your will, the last page of the letter details a plan for your escape that should present you with the best chance of success. _

_ On the other hand, you can pursue the legacy of magecraft that flows through your veins. If you choose this path, you will suffer much, and gain little. You may save someone from a fate worse than death. You may vindicate my own. But there is only the smallest chance of success, coupled with the greatest possibility of downfall. Should you follow this path, you will notice several books on the shelves throughout the house which you were not able to see before. Study from them, and take this letter in your hand after you learn the basics. _

_ I would understand either choice, and given that I can no longer influence your decisions, I only wish to support you in whichever direction you choose to go. _

__ With love, I was  
Your father,  
** Matou Byakuya **

Shinji glanced over the final page of the letter, but the plan for escape was just and only that _ : a plan for escape _ . There were no details on the enemy that had... that... had...

Without any awareness of where he was, or what he was doing, Shinji sat down on his bed, the thought refusing to complete itself. This was insane.  _ It was insane! _

_ He couldn't handle this. _ He wasn't special, but...

No.

He  _ was _ special.

The Matou were a family of Magi.

The Matou were a family of Magi, and he could be one of the greatest.

Hadn't his father said that? (His father had said no such thing.)

Yes. He wouldn't run away. He would find, and kill this monster that had taken his fathers life!

And if Matou Byakuya had been there to see this moment, he would have smiled.

The board had been set, and the pieces were upon it. The King was dead, but the game continued on, as, bereft of a leader, the pawn Shinji moved into the final depths of enemy territory. Not of his own volition, of course.

Pawns never moved themselves. _  
They were made to be used _ .

The hypnosis was complete.

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


##  ** Incipia! **

  
  


It was no coincidence at all, that, at the same moment Matou Shinji, who was meant to become the worst among men, lost the plot, a small, anachronistic brass pocketwatch ticked once. Backwards. And from his previous work, the hand of that watch's owner, whom we know as The Director, stilled - he ceased moving, ceased breathing, ceased  _ thinking _ , but for a desperate hope that -

And the watch ticked back again. And then again. And again. And again.

Silence and stillness held, save for the motion of the watch's hands - and what strange hands they were, made of some fey material like a sunset caught in molten glass.

"...damn the heavens all." The Immortal Man murmured - blasphemed, "It's woken up."

  
  


  
  


  
  


  
  


##  ** The Prismatic Hall **

  
  


Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg's workshop was utterly unique and completely infamous, this last not because it occupied an entire wing of the Clocktower, though it did; not because its projects were experiments in True Magic, though they were; and not because the mysteries contained within it were capable of melting reality, though they most assuredly could.

No; all of these things were unusual, and in one place truly, they were unique... but they went ignored, in light of a single grand heresy.

To be specific: Kischur maintained a strict open door policy.

In the last decade, not even a single magus had bothered taking advantage of it. This was, of course, not always the case. Every few decades, some bright young student would finally  _ get _ the basic secret behind the Second Magic, and walk into the Prismatic Hall to learn its deeper mysteries by reverse engineering whatever the Second Magician currently kept there.

Inevitably, they would leave the place several months later having usually learned nothing, and lost a great deal besides. One of the more common claims, among those who had studied there, was that Magecraft was, simply put,  _ impossible _ . And they would hold to this point regardless of the mysteries studied in the Tower on a daily basis.

I (your faithful narrator) mention this not because it is particularly relevant to the plot (though it may well be), but to give a general idea of the shape of existence in this place - for though I will attempt description in what follows, things that are and interfere with deep and fundamental truths of existence were never meant to be spoken of in the language of Albion, and that language is equally unsuited to speaking them. After all - if magecraft is to colour outside the lines, Magic is to paint outside the colours.

And all too often, such pursuits lead to madness.

The Director stepped into the antechamber of Hall, and beheld:

 _Akasha is the many!  
But __a_ __kasha is the one!  
Akasha is the all!  
But akasha is the none!  
AKASHA IS THE TRUTH!  
but akasha is a lie!  
FOR AKASHA IS CONTRADICTION,  
and it cannot be denied!

The letters, burned into the wallpaper and then decorated with some poor aspirant's blood, still smouldered slightly.

_ Of  _ ** course ** , The Director thought,  _ this only ever happens when I have to visit him. _

Extinguishing the remaining embers with an errant thought, The Director raised his hand to knock on the open door, thought better of it, and simply strode on through. The Second Magician's voice floated out of the air. "Artis. I'd say I wasn't expecting you, but that would imply I didn't know you were going to arrive!" A moment of silence, save for the humming of thousands of crystals. Then, "I'm in the... godsdamnit... I'm in Observatory Nine.  _ Zerwise _ , back, third fracture incipient on the negative time vector. Your timing could  _ not _ be more perfect!"

Zelretch had been watching him? That... did not bode well. No, not at all. The Director grabbed one of the shards of crystal floating in the air, fed it some prana, and used what very little he himself knew about the outermost peripheries of the Second Magic to make a turn in every direction simultaneously. He then took a step backwards, and waited for time to sort itself out. A fracture in the air displaying a green ocean made of crystalline flames appeared before him, then vanished, followed by another fracture, showing... Dear god, was  _ that _ what Type-Sedna looked like? Then it closed, leaving the Director perhaps somewhat mentally scarred.

Finally, the third fracture crossed the set of coordinates in temporal parameter space that The Director (and therefore, we) called present, and it showed, simply, a barren, white landscape.

And millions of subtly gleaming fragments of prismatic light flowing through the sky.

_ By the Original One, Kischur, _ the Director thought,  _ What have you done now? _

Before the break in the universe vanished, the Director stepped through it - and thence was on the surface of the Moon.

Strangely, he found he had no trouble breathing. Alarmingly, he was - somehow - outside the conceptual bounds of Earth - a problem that the cosmonauts who had come here some decades ago had _not_ had to worry about.

Kischur stood some way off in the distance, manipulating crystallised existence with great dexterity, which was beside the point, because this place was outside the concepts of mana and od, and while Luna might be perfectly hospitable to an Apostle Ancestor, The Director - a mere God - was in the process of rapidly dying despite the impossibility of that outcome.

Of course, to be a God is not without its benefits. Reaching into the sky with his spiritual aspect, the Director seized a line of grain, and worked a small bit of Theurgy.

" _ Theogony - Selene, _ " he murmured, though given the fact that the vast majority of its users existed outside of language, the use of incantation was, generally speaking, wholly unnecessary under this System. As a cloak of Lunar concepts drew around his being, he felt a silent link to SELENE, the Supreme Reality Marble of Luna, connect to his personage, pass though the conceptual interface, and begin to supply his body with the necessary resources for its continued functioning. There was also a slight sense of curiosity and trepidation from the World.

' _ Just meeting an in-betweener. Acquaintance.'  _ The Director thought, silently grateful for the immense conceptual similarities between Gaia that was and  Selene that made the thought comprehensible to the World. There was a brief sensation of wordless acknowledgement, and the sense of attention vanished.

At some point in the process, Kischur had stopped manipulating his... observatory. Apparently, staring at him was more interesting.

"That," the Apostle Ancestor said, "Is possibly the  _ coolest _ thing I've ever seen you do!"

"...what's so cold about it?" The Director asked, slightly nonplussed.

"...Have you been keeping up with developments in English? At all?" Kischur asked.

"I was offworld for the last thirty years. Tricentatridecatriennial meeting to discuss the ongoing issue of..." The Director glanced around, searching for an object in the sky, found it, and pointed at the blue-white sphere, "...that. Cool is some sort of idiomatic expression?"

"Listen to yourself," Zelretch said, "Idiomatic expression? Really? Get with the nineties, man!"

"Too busy preventing the most recent apocalypse to effect Sol's problem child."

Zelretch stopped.

"Oh. So you noticed it too? Tell me - since when did the Pleroma start making advances with my Kaleidoscope?"

" _ What _ -" The Director began, before shaking his head, "No, forget that - I'm sure you've found a way to take the Operation of Parallel Worlds and turn it into some kind of detection system but - no. It's duality breakdown. In six years, something near your Great Grail System is going to try to forcibly shatter the balance between spiritual and material Worlds . And, as you know, if it even starts..."

"...the runaway effect will continue until the Planet fails and is broken into a web of discordant concepts. Anything that lives there and survives will be dumped into SOL." Kischur sighed. "Overcount. But not of 1999." That last bit in a musing, perplexed tone of voice.

The Director nodded and shrugged in a single motion. "Sometimes things happen outside of fate. Rarely so significant, but... it happens. So I need you around, Wizard Marshall. Because -" The Director sighed. No words survived in Gaia or Alaya could carry the concepts that the ticking of the watch  _ meant _ . So instead, he said, "We'll need to make use of Site IV, and you're the only person with enough experience to enter it safely with the necessary knowledge to bridge the gap. I'll-"

"I can't."

"... what?"

"Come over here." Zelretch nodded upwards. "Look through the lenses."

Wordlessly, The Director did so, walking forward until he stood under the virtual galaxy of prismatic shards, and looked up, through them, into a small circle of sky burning in nameless colours - shades that did not exist beyond the infrared or ultraviolet, so much as above, below, or even underneath the entire spectrum itself.

_ "Kischur,  _ are these-"

"The bounded fields projected by the nearest stars? Yes. It took me  _ decades _ to figure out how to filter out SOL. But I want you to look at the distortion, not the background."

"The... distortion..." The God murmured. Looking through the lens again, he saw nothing strange, beyond the silently spinning madness and riot of colours that marked the territories of the stars in the sky. Some large, some small; the scope of effect only tangentially linked to the - _ there _ !

At the northern corners of the sky, above the disc of the Milky Way, things were being pushed in another, completely impossible direction.

And as soon as  _ that _ thought passed his mind, the structure of the Second Magician's observatory adjusted itself, the background glow of stellar bounded fields lightening, mixing all into one nameless allcolour.

And there, it was.

Beating like a malign heart.

A roiling thing.

Golden plasma, arcing across its surface.

Tears in the warp and weft of reality bleeding behind it.

And just the subtlest hints, at the outermost limits: a prismatic corona.

As The Director watched it, some indefinable limit was breached, and though it grew no larger, somehow,  _ somehow  _ it had come  _ closer _ .

Quietly, Kischur said, "I call it Wormwood."

"The poison star of Saint John's Apocalypse," The Director murmured. "That is a  _ terrible _ joke, Zel-"

"Do you really think I would make a joke concerning  ** that ** !?" the Apostle Ancestor hissed.

Silence.

Finally: "How?"

"Does it even matter?" Kischur sighed. "When I was diminished after destroying the Will of the Moon, I swore I'd save the last guttering sparks of my strength for a crisis that truly required them."

The Fourth Ancestor stared up at the burning image. "I fear this might be it. That  _ thing _ ," he said, looking up into the lens of the observatory, "is of the Second Magic, and another. One that  _ should not exist _ , just as I should be the only owner of my Law. If anyone will be able to negate it, before it brings the fate it carries to the world..."

"It will be you." The Director finished.

"Aye. So it shall. And, my friend, I think it will take everything I have."

"...there is another way." The Director said, so quietly that it may have been a whisper, "Join us. Become one of the Go-"

"No, means no, you counterfeit Noah!" Kischur snapped. "You're all right. The rest of your faction is completely  _ insane _ , bar none. At least from a human perspective," he said, then murmured, "...and, I suppose, a Lunar one..." before gesturing decisively, "No. The Pleroma is a beautiful dream, but its goal is something that, as a Magician, I must  _ never _ allow."

Kischur smiled. "That I stand aside and let the riot of everything continue shows just how poor a Magician I am, I think."

His face hardened. "But don't think for a second I will grant  _ them _ another key to the  _ Anbaric _ . What they have done with the  _ First  _ Law is terrible enough."

"And you keep this resolve, even if that means that the world will burn cold?"

"The world  _ must _ ." Kischur said, with absolute conviction, "But only  _ when _ it  _ must _ . That  _ thing _ up there is completely unnecessary, and I intend to stop it. If that ends me, so be it. All I have is a single request, old friend."

"Name it."

"If this is the last time we see each other, if I die, see that the Tohsaka are given everything. The Second Magic needs a Magician to practice it."

"It will be done."

"I know it will. You may not be quite human,  _ Alayakind _ , but you, at least, understand honour. Thank you... and a warning."

"Yes?"

"If I fail, Wormwood will arrive... in six years. Once is a coincidence. Twice is providence. Thrice? Be wary. I fear a storm is coming, the likes of which no world has ever seen."

And, with those words, Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg, Conqueror of the Moon, Fourth Apostle Ancestor, and the Second Magician used his Magic, touched the Divinity of Space and Time, and as the air broke into fractured pieces of alternity, for a moment, the Director saw not Zelretch, the man, but Zelretch,  _ the concept _ . Not just the Second Magician, but the  _ idea _ of a Second Magician, his actions, his path, his story. Every beginning, and every branch, all tightly coiled around a singularity that defined who he was  _ now _ .

"Akasha," The Concept of Zelretch spoke, "Open to me."

For a single instant, the man who had become a God, who Zelretch called Artis and whom the world called  _ Director _ experienced nothingness, as for a moment, every last one of his senses failed. He imagined it might be something like the Root: just an empty,  _ empty _ void.

Then, abruptly, the world returned. And the Operator of Parallel Worlds was  _ gone _ .

Not only from this world. From all of them.

And at the same moment, with none to see it, with none who would know what it meant if they could see it, and with absolute force and utter finality, a sound echoed throughout the bedrock of all existence.

It was of a gate, slamming shut.

...and -

\- though the change itself had gone unnoticed, its effects?

They were felt by many indeed.

  
  


  
  


##  **Two Months Hence  
** **A Sample of an** **Autobiography**

  
  


Located upon the waters of Oslofjorden in the country of Norway is the isle of Håøya. It is an utterly unremarkable place. No plots were born there, grand battles fought there, aye, nor have any heroes even so much as crossed its land during their journeys. It's a calm, unremarkable sort of place. The greatest event in its entire history was when several soldiers of the Third Reich saw fit to execute six men upon its shores.

It does, however, have its positive sides.

For instance: It has the highest rate of unexplained disappearances in the entire country. This has been investigated with all the greatest tools at the disposal of the scientific world. There is no consensus - not even a single hypothesis exists that others haven't torn to shreds.

In the end, the Isle simply inspires a kind of nameless dread; and it is perhaps, the most secluded place in the world that exists in plain sight. Humans do not even  _ want _ to think of it, because it is the unknown. But when they do, well - certainly, there must be  _ some _ explanation.

The mortal soul  _ craves _ explanation, I've found. It is their most precious addiction.

Take away an opium addict's plant, and he may die. Destroy a human's ability to make sense of their world and... Well, all too often, they kill themselves. But if they don't, their minds do it for them.

And so, the disappearances surrounding the isle: always and forever rationalized. A pattern of abductions, three hundred years in the making?  _ Sampling error! _ They cry!

So  _ precious _ !

So  _ very _ fitting!

And it has been my work, of three hundred years, to cultivate this impression; to let it settle in, to work on it and establish it until the idea that there is nothing to find on my island took a life of its own, as all legends do. Once it had, I could slaughter the adjacent city, one of the festering cores of the  _ mockery _ called Alaya - drown myself upon the red of their veins, and the World itself would not even notice!

Really, what more could an Apostle of the Crimson Moon ask for?

  
  


  
  


##  ** Håøya **

  
  


The palace hidden upon the shores of Håøya was devoid of all life. But it was not empty.

No. Though it was forgotten by all but a very few, it was full: of the dead walking, of things animated by logic not of this world. Of lifeless bodies taking lifeless steps, hearts unbeating, souls pulled against the violent tug of death by tidal force.

Men, women, children who would never grow old, walked through the halls, the polished stone of the floor granting them no reflection - for that was the pact between Gaia and the Crimson Moon, and to this day it is  _ honoured _ .

They who wander those darkened halls look back at their humanity, and secretly, quietly, in the way of monsters, they yearn for it... But do not return. For they have seen the truth. And what is a home, that costs you everything - your life, your dignity, your potential - for the mere price of living there?

What price should the lives of people who would sell everything they could ever be for the mindless comfort of companionship command?

The answer is none whatsoever - the human kind are livestock. Some have enough of a spark in them to one day become as lost as their shepherds. Given the chance, most will simply remain - shambling. The dead, to the world, and everything else.

It is a price worth paying. This conclusion is all but inevitable for the Vampire Kind.

This, more than anything else, is why they must be destroyed.

  
  


Fury descended upon the palace on the shores of Håøya. It descended from the sky.

  
  


  
  


##  ** Three Hours Hence **

  
  


It is a generally accepted fact that Dead Apostles do not process pain. With a body that physically  _ can not _ die, the sensation, on the whole is a rather useless thing, and is one of the first human concepts to fade from their minds.

Lorelei perused the dimly lit library, marvelling at the store of knowledge the creature had assembled. It was the easy equal of anything one of the great families had on hand - a collection that even the Church might envy.

A member of her brigade approached her from behind. She held out her hand, and a saucer holding a teacup was placed in it. The brigadier retreated in excellent - though not perfect - silence. A new recruit. Across the same moment, a tortured wail echoed through the halls of the castle.

"That's right!" A woman's voice followed it, " _ Scream _ , you son of a bitch!"

A very slight smile made its way to Lorelei's face, and for the moment, she allowed its presence. It was generally accepted that Dead Apostles do not process pain. It wasn't every day that a magus spent four years of labour on absolutely  _ nothing _ but proving a single truism wrong - but when that mage was of sufficient skill and motivation...

Another scream.

Louvre had been a fool, to kill Sannalina Edelfelt.

Lorelei took another sip of the tea as the Dead Apostle muttered something sobbing and indistinct in the background. The brew was of acceptable quality for a recent battlefield - she would have to find the brigadier that had made it, and enquire as to why it was not of superb quality, for such base conditions. They were better than that. They were  _ all _ better than that.

Her train of thought was slightly interrupted when her gaze fell upon a particularly interesting volume: an  _ uncensored _ copy of _ The Origin _ ; a book that could  _ not _ exist in any location - but for one.

_ To have removed this from the Church's Bibliotheca Prohibitorum... I wonder if Solomon had anything to do with it? _

Still...

Lorelei took the small volume, and pocketed it. It had been destroyed for a  _ reason _ , one she even agreed with, and it wouldn't do to leave it where anyone could simply open the thing and learn Erasmus' theses.

What would ultimately become of this last copy was a question for another time.

For now, it would be allowed to remain.

This was after all, a good day.

An upstart Apostle: Destroyed.

Wizard Marshall Sannalina Edelfelt: Avenged.

A major base of operations: Secured.

A fully-manifest Noble Phantasm: Obtained.

And oh,  _ yes _ -

Dead Apostles: Now - at long,  _ long _ last - capable of pain.

In one day they had reduced the vampire kind by five hundred, advanced the study of conceptual weapons by likely  _ decades _ , and taken control of one of the largest and most important nexuses of ley lines in Europe.

This - again, and for emphasis - was a  _ damn _ good day.

Therefore, it made perfect sense the a certain someone would have to ruin it.

_ "The remnants at Site IV are beginning to show signs of life."  _ With those simple words, the Director of the Clock Tower revealed himself apropos of nowhere, and thoroughly ruined everything. Lorelei suppressed her battle instincts, swallowed, sighed, and placed her cup of tea back down upon the saucer before glaring at the man.

"I can only assume," she said, "that your dearest wish is your head on a pike."

"...no. My dearest wish was to see Lady Barthomeloi perform, ah, what is the phrase? A spit take."

"As I said," Lorelei agreed, "Your head.  ** On a pike. ** "

"Oh don't even try it. I'm immortal, you know."

"I'm sure that I can figure something out."

"I'm sure you could. Getting back to topic though,  _ the remnants at Site IV are showing signs of life. _ "

"Yes, yes. Site Four; nonstandard mesoamerican sacrificial site, possibly Apostolic in origin, summons  _ things _ from the conceptual without of definition whenever anyone uses prana in a five kilometre radius - a problem, but not a large one. Certainly something that the Enforcers covering that area are capable of dealing with. I hardly see why you called."

"Not Site Four. Site  _ Ivy _ ." The Director said, emphasizing the pronunciation of the last part, at last making it clear that, no, he was in fact  _ not _ speaking Roman numerals out loud.

Lorelei resisted the urge to demonstrate her frustration, if barely, and with forced calm asked, "And where, pray tell, is  _ that _ ?"

"The Indus Valley. It's a  _ high _ affair," the Director said, affecting carelessness on the last sentence.

Lorelei didn't even freeze. She just sat back, and drank the rest of her tea with efficiency and silence. Once it was gone, she placed the cup back on the saucer with deliberate smoothness, set it on a bookshelf and gestured silently.  _ Follow me _ .

She turned, and walked from the library, and down the halls. Brigadiers walking about saluted her as they passed, and Lorelei greeted them by name. There was  _ also _ the occasional Enforcer, though they tended to bow nervously. One performed a Roman salute. Lorelei, for her part, didn't deign to acknowledge any of them.

After making their way through a veritable maze of corridors, and up a seemingly endless staircase, they came out into the light of day on a high tower. A man dressed in red stared out at the sky, humming absently as his fingers drummed across the stone parapets.

"Wizard Marshall," Lorelei acknowledged, then commanded, "Leave."

"And why should -" He began, but then saw the Director behind her. "-  _ Ah _ . By yer leave, then-" He said, stepped up onto the parapets, then dropped off, over the side.

A few moments later, there was a sound of breaking masonry.

"... that man is insufferable." Lorelei murmured.

"Why not remove him?" The Director asked. "A few of your senior brigadiers are his equal in combat potential."

"But not generalship." Lorelei countered. "The Enforcer Corps needs someone like him, and at present, Duchesne is the best man for that job by far. The _ problem _ is that he is  _ aware _ of that fact _. _ "

"Ah."

Lorelei then made a slight gesture, and the air pressure around them lowered fractionally, as everything outside a ten metre radius blurred and began to swim.

"There. It's blatant that we're having an interesting conversation, but none here have the means to listen in." Her voice gained an incisive edge. "You swore you had told me everything I needed to know. You lied. Talk."

The Director relaxed his own obscuration magecraft and sighed simultaneously, running a hand through his hair. "It's like that parable about the world being carried by a turtle."

Lorelei, refusing to respond verbally to a statement as vague and useless as that, made an impatient twirling gesture with her fingers.

"Turtles all the way down!" The Director anticlarified, then clarified, "I could tell you secrets of the universe for a thousand thousand years, and there would still be more secrets to tell. I'd have to research them as I spoke them to you, because there are limits to even my knowledge. I tried to cover everything relevant, last time. Everything actively dangerous, and everything that had any chance of becoming so. I missed Site Ivy because... it was gone, Lorelei.  _ It was gone _ . Lost in the eye of a storm that  _ nothing _ \- not man, nor spirit, nor God - could cross."

"And that storm has died." Lorelei didn't ask.

"Not yet. But  _ soon _ . We have two years."

"Well," said Lorelei, "At least you told me in plenty of time."

"No," The Director said, shaking his head, "I told you because it became a problem. The Second Magician has left this world, and his Magic was by  _ far _ the safest route to cross the gap. Without it, I'll have to make recourse to a Mystic Code I developed - and that method is fraught with peril."

"What is this 'gap'?"

"A primordial demon. Etu.  _ Inchoata Prime. _ "

Silence was born from that statement, as Lorelei came to grips with the fact that -

"A primordial demon is  _ upon _ Earth!?"

"No!" The Director said. "It's not so simple. At the centre of the Site is a point, where one can open a gate -  _ the _ gate, actually - behind that gate, which  _ only _ Zelretch or I have the necessary knowledge to open, is the gap which is the demon, which is asleep, and cannot wake up - nor are its dreams of any danger beyond its limits - it's just  _ there _ . Beyond the gap lies... A concept that is not valid on Earth, and within that idea, a dead  _ city _ \- but largely intact. Within that city is a tower, and within the tower, the calamity incipient. And just possibly, the answer I need to prevent another."

"You know a great deal about the place, for it to have been so harmless." Lorelei noted, tone neutral.

"I should. I'm the one who ended it, last time."

Which was a fairly interesting revelation, Lorelei considered. The Director, inasmuch as he had comprehensible motives seemed concerned for the entirety of humankind - a noble, if somewhat illogical burden to carry. To slaughter an entire city...

Lorelei paused in that train of thought as another occurred to her, and considered the Mage's Association itself - an organization The Director had built from the ground up. A gathering of magi to share information and preserve the art - which also had the side effect of making finding practitioners of Mysteries that threatened the world incredibly easy. Those magi: placed under Sealing Designation, their Mysteries blacklisted and their freedom outlawed.

To end a city from the Age of the Gods - an age when even the weakest of humans could master enough magecraft to put an average magus of the present day to shame - all that that city would have to do would be to learn something dangerous, and share it freely.

"I have a question," Lorelei said. The Director nodded.

"How much of the present state of magecraft is a direct result of your influence?"

There was an achingly long silence, before at last, The Director replied.

"Prometheus gave fire to mankind, and as a result, the Gods condemned him to be eaten alive - forever. What do you think it would cost humanity if such proud, cruel beings ever learnt that they had not  _ used  _ the divine flame, but sought to  _ understand _ it?"

And then, without any warning, he was gone in the same fashion he had arrived, not by a mystery or Magic, but simply no longer present in the fabric of the World.

Lorelei sighed, letting the mystery protecting their privacy disperse. Whenever she thought she understood just  _ what _ she had gotten involved in all those years ago, something happened to completely upset that view. And sometimes...

No. She preferred a mystery to ignorance. After all - under every stone unturned was a truth.

_ She would find them all. _

  
  


  
  


  
  


##  ** Elsewhere Everywhere  
Without Out **

  
  


A world that was no longer a world. A conceptual space outside of definition. Shearing chaos enveloped existence, eroding all boundaries until everything descended into absolute, nihilistic unity. Save one.

And then another appeared.

Standing in the eye of a conceptual storm, the two old friends watched - as the universe forever and eternally unravelled.

"You say many things," the original one, who was there before the other, remarked, "But I wonder if you ever truly mean any of them."

"When I want to," the newcomer replied, voice neutral.

"And only then?" Amusement, that trailed off as the silence grew. Finally -

"No." The latecomer spoke at last, "I am afraid I lack your conceit."

"Then you have - after entirely too long, but you have - grown wise. Tell me, though: Was it worth it?"

The storm of chaos stilled, as for the briefest of moments, everything approached a state of simple non-existence. Such a thing could never last, not after...

Ah, but there was no longer an after here; and time flowed in all directions and endless spirals that praised and loved only themselves, and brought neither memory nor premonition, but endless fractal alternities of an eternal present.

Still... for just a moment, at all levels, the pattern approached unity, and the storm stilled as this nowhere place drifted close to the world of being as an awareness both oceanic and chthonic breached its limitless depths.

"You would have brought the end."

"Nay, I would have brought the  _ possibility _ . Not the wretched thing itself."

"The possibility  _ shouldn't exist _ ."

"The possibility  _ must _ exist."

"Then we are still at an impasse."

"No. You are. Now - enough evading the question. She is waiting."

"I... hah! After all these years, I don't know. But I made my choice." Bitterness, "And I will live with its consequences."

"I see."  ** Absolute understanding ** . "Very well. Good fortunes to you, though the human kind be damned for it."

And the nowhere place was gone.

The Director slowly stood up, drawing to his full height as he let the illusion of his mortality die, his deity returning in fitful bursts, like the flame of a candle which, ready to burn out, had found more fuel in the last instant.

He held still for a moment, as his perception of the world expanded outwards, from the unity of chaos, through the concepts of Earth before finally settling on a level above simple description.

"Love?" He muttered. "Madness."

And then, he began down the halls with purpose.

It was time, once again, to begin the grim work of saving the world.

  
  


  
  


##  ** Five Years Prior  
to the Terminal Grail War **

  
  


Waver leaned back in the chair of his office, relaxing, enjoying a rare moment of calm. For once, every project was going smoothly, things were quiet on the political front (actually, that was bordering suspicious), and, well, all was well in the world.

Taking a sip from his tea - Earl Grey, taken without sugar or cream - he glanced over at the black box on his shelf. He had brought it two years ago in a fit of nostalgia, and a well-preserved Joy Station sat above it, a game in the cartridge slot.

Initially, the Heiress of the Archibald had demanded he remove it. Her outrage had been  _ adorable _ . Eventually, he had said he would, but only if she could best him in a game. He chose  _ Admirable _ .

Over the course of the game, two things had happened. The first: He had devastated her forces with ease. The second... though she would never,  _ ever _ admit to it ( _ Heresy! Scandal! _ ), Irene Archibald had become a gamer.

This had caused some waves in the clan, though nothing he couldn't handle by that point - although he often wondered just what the  _ hell _ Lorelei Barthomeloi had been thinking when she decided that Waver's penalty for the death of the Head of the Archibald Clan was to  _ rule over them _ .

Grabbing a remote control on a whim, Waver turned the television on. It was set to BBC 4, and came on right at the start of some fluff piece.

"On today's show, we discuss the plan to construct an industrial plant upon the former Aylesbury Vale Preserve. This area, deemed to contain insufficient conserved species, was recently auctioned off to a private firm to generate revenue. The sale sparked hot debate among the local citizens, some of whom believe that the deal with renowned industrialist Andrew Ryan should never have been carried to completion. Here to state his case to the public, we have the titular man -"

Waver tuned the broadcast out. He had some formulas to run if he ever wanted to -

"- Ornithologist Eiren Salzburg, to offer her perspective -"

\- manage to turn Volumen Hydrargyrum into something that truly suited his -

"- and the head of the Global Alliance for the Conservation of Avian Diversity, Gransurg Blackmore."

Some of the finest Earl Grey in the world sprayed out of Waver's mouth.

There was a muffled, " _ Yes! _ " from outside the doorway as Waver broke into a coughing fit, and the door opened as something bypassed his bounded fields as if they didn't exist to begin with.

Still hacking, Waver spun, a minor curse glowing a deep, unhealthy Cherenkov blue on his fingertip... And paused. The...  _ person _ who stood before him (and truly, he hesitated to use that word) took the pause as an invitation to begin speaking excitedly.

"Lord El-Melloi the Second! You're just the man I wanted to see! Oh, I've been ever so  _ excited _ for this meeting, why, when I heard the Queen herself had, if not an apprentice (and you don't consider that a slight do you? only, you have yet to be formally recognized), then at least a  _ protégé _ , I knew I had to see the man who captured our lady Barthomeloi's eyes with my -"

Siphoning his attention past its meaningless babble, Waver looked,  _ really _ _ looked _ , at the figure before him. Its face was an indistinguishable mess of conflicting, contradictory, and ever-shifting shadows which somehow conveyed expression. Its eyes were absolutely colourless - they weren't even grey. Beyond that, its clothes were utterly out of time. Yes, some of the more eccentric fashions in the Association dated back a few hundred years, but this costume...

The materials alone, if concrete and not a prana-based materialisation of internally-stored concepts, would be suitable for use in the very highest level of material thaumaturgy.

_...Either this man is an eccentric and tremendously powerful magus, _ he thought,  _ Or one of our projects has just gone very,  _ ** very ** _ wrong. _

Cancelling the curse on his fingertips (against a wraith,  _ that _ particular spell would have no effect; against a magus of this... person's apparent calibre, it was just stupidly unwise), Waver cut the thing off and asked, "- are you one of the solid incarnations I've had Team Adelier working on for the last few months?"

"Oh? That sounds absolutely  _ fascinating _ ! But no, no, no - not at all!" The person replied jovially, then leaned in closer and quietly, as if imparting one of the great secrets of the world, murmured, "I'm  The Director."

"Oh!" Waver said, considerably relieved. A magus was still dangerous, but if this magus looked like nobody at all, it was probably, at least,  _ intentional _ . "I'm sorry, but things being as they are, I haven't had the time to go to one of the annual interdepartmental meetings yet. My predecessor, well..."

"I heard all about it," the person said, rising back up into a relaxed posture, "Bad business, that - very bad. Always knew Lord Mestacia wasn't exactly stable... But, ah, vivisecting (necrosecting?) Ghost Liners without a procedure to put them back together? Unforgivable. The Ghost Kind are hard enough to find docile examples of already, without destroying what we've managed to put together here."

"...We?" Waver asked.

The person paused for the briefest interval, before gesturing explosively, arms flung out to its sides, "The Mage's Association, Lord El-Melloi!"

"Ah, of course." Waver said, frowning internally. ' _ Something is not right with that answer...' _

If he thought about it, he couldn't put anything concrete to the feeling. It just felt... incomplete. An answer with the potential to reach truth, a model for truth, but not truth in and of itself.

_ \- like-that-world-of-end-less-shade - _

Waver felt a moment of phantasmal vertigo, and blinked, all but forgetting that last thought as his world settled itself.

"Yes," the Director murmured, barely audible "It's already been decided." Then, more loudly, "At any rate, I came here today hoping to satisfy my curiosity, but then -"

The Director of the unspecified department stared at the television and murmured, "- what the effing hell is the Sixteenth Ancestor doing on TV wearing a flesh mask? And why does he have a parrot?"

"What?" Waver glanced back to the television and beheld - well, exactly what the Director, department unknown, had described. Blackmore had an African grey parrot held in his hand, and was currently engaging it in a series of simple questions. Currently, he held a card in his hand with a heptagrammatic star printed or drawn on its surface, along with several indistinct symbols Waver couldn't make out.

"Iska, how many points?"

The parrot - Iska, presumably - began to count as Waver mutely stared. The Director, meanwhile, was for some reason smiling faintly.

"You know," Waver said, as Iska the parrot reached seven, paused, then triumphantly crowed, ' _ Seven points!' _ , "This day tops all for most bizarre in the last two years. Give me the bad news."

("Do you love Eiren, Iska?" Blackmore asked.)

"And how could I do that when I have none to bear?"

"Please, Mister..."

"Temanekona Laifasz."

("I love Eiren!" Iska confirmed. Blackmore nodded gravely, as if a question with all the weight of the world had just been answered.)

"A family I have never heard of," Waver said keeping his tone nothing but polite as he delivered the calculated insult - a little trick one picked up while navigating the higher reaches of the underground nobility, and incidentally excellent for hiding wariness. Wariness like the sort generated by a magus of this being's calibre being completely unknown.

"Indeed?" The Director responded, his own tone faux curious, and obviously so. "Now, I wonder how that could've happened...?"  _ Sotto voce _ .

"If you have magecraft capable of hiding your features so gracefully, I'm certain you could've applied it to your own name. Perhaps..." Waver murmured, "Perhaps even your own department? It would explain why I haven't seen you on any of the organization charts. But that begs the question -"

"What about my domain is so critical that the concept of its continued existence in the world must be not only removed from memory, but actively concealed. Yes." And in the course of that sentence, the energy, the excitement, the unnerving  _ verve _ simply dropped from the Director's persona. "I was wondering what kind of mind had intrigued Lorelei enough to stay an execution - one desired by her...  _ dear _ ... friends, no less. You are, at least, perceptive.  _ Uncannily _ so. Though again, I suppose the decision has already been made."

"That's the second time you said that," Waver noted.

Choosing to ignore the comment, the figure held out its left hand, and said, "Director Laifasz of the Wizards Martial. By the authority invested in me by the Director of the Mage's Association, as of this day, December 17th 1999, you have been inducted into our ranks on a trial placement. For now, you've been given the slot previously occupied by one Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg."

The world seemed to stop, and Waver heard himself say, faintly, "Ah. So what you came to give me today - it was a death sentence."

("Would you kindly examine this marvellous creature, Mister Ryan?" Blackmore asked. The industrialist refused.)

The magus withdrew its hand. "Nonsense. Well, maybe. Perhaps even likely. I think you'll do fine, though. The Kaleidoscope has taken a sabbatical to wherever it is the Second Magic allows him to go, and we need someone with a decent understanding of the interface between the internal and external Worlds for an upcoming operation. I read the research papers generated by the various departments, and a certain facet of the work you have done here directly - reducing the entropic response of the world against a spirit - could be adjusted to fit the requirements of what we need. There were other candidates of course, but given the exceptional reaction you provoked from Lorelei..." Laifasz shook its head, and continued, "You are a mystery, Lord El-Melloi, and I know not if you cultivated that or stumbled into it, but I will understand how a third generation magus upsets centuries of tradition and manages to take the Directorship of a department and defend it for  _ five years _ from the attempts of our most respected Lords! "

By the end, the presumptive Director was very nearly shouting, and Waver sighed internally.  _ Oh. Joy and the mercy of the Lord. Another bigot. _

("Come now! I insist!" Blackmore moved his hand towards the man, and Iska leapt onto Ryan's shoulder, prompting the man to jump up in what might've been an attempt to shake the bird loose.)

"- Though you certainly are more competent than the lot of them," The figure noted in an odd, almost clinically detached tone, disproving Waver's supposition. Laifasz raised an indistinct eyebrow. "My position, Lord El-Melloi, is a dire one. I can not indulge in games of blood and research. The hard truth is that even the greatest of families have been declining for some time now. You, on the other hand, have come from nowhere and grasped hold of something that none of them can even see. I  _ will _ understand it, because - and here, I prove you right - The end of this world is at hand. Would you stop it, report to the Symposium chamber on the thirty first at  noon with a version of your entropic canceller fit to cover a human, conceptually hardened. If the death of innocents is no weight on your conscience..." Laifasz's voice trailed off, face becoming as cold as stone. "We will find another way."

And then, ultimatum delivered, the figure vanished.

His mind a storm of thoughts, Waver paid no notice to the scene unfolding on the television screen.

Would that he had, he would have born witness one of the most important events in the history of the world unfold in a single, absolutely masterful stroke.

The industrialist, Andrew Ryan, sat back down, and Iska leapt off his shoulder and flew back to Blackmore's hands. The moment the bird alighted upon them, Ryan's face became oddly distant, his eyes unfocused, and glassy.

"I've been convinced," he said. "On this day, I would like to announce publicly that I am donating the Aylesbury site to the Global Alliance for the Conservation of Avian Diversity."

And on Gransurg Blackmore's face, there was not even the faintest hint of surprise.

"Of course." The Apostle Ancestor said, nodding gravely, "We shall take great care of the Preserve. The greatest care of all."

 


	4. Chapter 4

#  _Final_

_END of HALCYON DAYS_

  


  


##  _**10,795,312,188 AD,  
**_ **in the** **The City of...**

  


She was running, as the sky fell around her. Muted were the screams of the others, as a desperation she couldn't understand filled her with the simple and animal need to run. To run, to run, to run _to run_!

Her feet cut against the flowing stone in the ground, leaving hot blood in her wake, but for all the pain that caused, it was _nothing_ compared to the new understanding trying to take root in her breast. Tears ran down her face as an alien mockery of a human voice called out an inhuman name, and a conceptual shockwave glassed the air, then shot through her, and then, slowly, she sank to her knees.

She was alone.

And her flight was in futility.

Just ahead of her, one of the spears of light touched the ground... and the world itself unravelled beneath her feet, taking her with it.

And where she had been, there was shearing chaos. A nowhere place, where Gaea would never be.

And this... was how Leika died.

and died.

and died.

and died.

But never quite reached dead.

Time is a braid. A shifting kaleidoscope of worldlines, and though not a single thread was left where she hadn't died, in some places, those terminal strands had gone off course - had run aground in something deeper than death, and more fathomless than space.

A world of perfect incompletion.

A place where even the dead might not die.

And the braid unravels.

 

  


She was running, as the sky fell around her. Muted were the screams of the others, as a desperation she couldn't understand filled her with the simple and animal need to run. To run, to run, to run _to run_!

The Name of All Downfalls was declared, once more.

And that selfsame conceptual shock blasted out, redefining the world.

But she wasn't alone.

A hand held hers, and then tugged as she faltered. And instead of sinking to her knees, though it was hopeless, pointless, though continued flight was utterly meaningless, she found herself following in her companion's path, and matching his pace, as they both fled before the storm.

He was a man utterly out of time, in a place that he had no right to be in, and, you know?

Perhaps, just perhaps, that was enough to make a difference.

Just behind them, one of the spears of light touched the ground... and the world itself unravelled beneath their feet, taking them with it.

All of this, on a single thread of the great chain of being.

Time would tell if they survived.

  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


_From denial follows and surges the flow_

_From one two come, declare the other unknown_  
Both born without the other, and each other deny,  
Declare themselves alien, and another a lie

_All the fragments perfected, and in disarray joined  
Writ whole without change; thus completion was coined. _

_Union from disorder, all chaos framed  
in potential manifest, and against itself chained._

_In completion perfected; where potential abhorred,_   
_Where potential infected, completion endured_   
_And each other inflected, in neither denied,_

_In denial writ truth, and composed it of lies!_

  


**Erasmus' _The Origin_. Canto 2:1-16. O.D.P. 1692 CE.**

  


  


## London, England  
December 31st 1999

  


At 10 AM, on New Year's Eve, as the populace of London prepared for the upcoming celebrations, there was one home where the turning of a new millennia wasn't on a single person's mind.

While the leaders of the family held conference to determine contingencies for the calamitous course of action that their lord had decided upon, others - both those lower in the family and hired servants alike swarmed around one man like carrion flies.

This man endured their attentions with the sort of unremitting stoicism that was either the cornerstone of someone's character, or proof positive that they were hiding an internal panic attack. In this particular case, it was almost both.

At last, the servants having finished their initial ministrations, drew back, and brought a mirror before the man. He inspected himself with a degree of detachment that he had learned only with great difficulty - he had to remain absolutely objective at this point, because what was to follow, lethal though it would likely be, would also establish his family among the greatest of the Clocktower's elites.

At length, he nodded in approval and spoke, "Coat." And held out his arms in the appropriate position. Thus clothed, he announced, "That light brown scarf the Heir Apparent purchased in Italy. Then, _that_ cape."

"But my Lord -" one of the members of the family's cadet branch, who had been pressed into this service, protested.

"Do you intend for me to walk to my death, Fraxinus Mellites?"

"No. No, of course not -"

"Then," implacably, voice level and low, each syllable taking the same time as the others, " _bring me_ _that_ _cape_."

Watching as the branch member disappeared to retrieve the requested item, the Lord added, "Additionally, the gloves I made - the black ones."

A servant nodded, walked over to a dresser, and opening a drawer withdrew a pair of gloves that seemed to eat the light but for an incredibly complex, intricate overlay of symbols writ on the back with such artistry that it gave them the air of objects not to be worn, but only admired from a distance.

The Lord held out a hand, accepted the gloves placed into it, and donned them almost carelessly. Presently, Fraxinus Mellites returned, bearing a volume of fabric in his arms and carrying it as if it were much, much heavier than its size should have permitted. As with the gloves, mercurial light reflected off the cape, scattering a constellation of lights on the room's walls.

Accepting the cape from the young man, the Lord threw it over his shoulders, and upon his frame it hung as if it carried no weight at all. Slowly, from both the cape and the gloves, the designs faded.

The Lord studied himself again.

His face, as ever was most charitably described as sharply defined, but it no longer held the signatures of youthful naivete. His time had worn heavily on him, already, and some of the signs of age had appeared prematurely. However, as things stood now, he couldn't hold that as a mark against. Nearly every magi he would meet upon this night was decades his senior.

Age was, absurdly, his ally - even as it cut down all men.

The clothing he wore was _fine_ , made to a standard of perfection so great that the threads would have appeared perfectly ordered even under the greatest of magnification. And yet for all that, to a layperson, it wouldn't have seemed to be much - slightly eccentric, certainly, but in their minds, a costume that they could afford.

_But nothing could be further from the truth._

_Veneers_. The world of the present day _lived_ in veneers, and those who lived in it bought appearances, while magi wore the reality. Every item of clothing he wore would have cost years of effort for the majority of Britain's population to be able to afford. Decades for those in less developed portions of the world. But not a single person would at first glance be able to discern that truth - or at second, or third.

He looked as mundane as he was élite, and that was as it should be, for a magus - for to lie with the truth was the greatest form of deception, and the only one the World traded in.

"It will do," he pronounced, and strode from the room without a moment of consideration more.

The rest of the house was quiet as the grave, and though the sun still shone, the clouds in the sky let none of light through without first making it sourceless. Snow fell, and that added to the quiet, building the silence up into something rather like a terrible storm.

Holding himself as one who was born to command, the Lord strode down the halls of the home until he stood in front of the door. With no hesitance he reached out, and -

"So that's it, then?" A young, strident voice questioned him, a slight vocal _jerk_ disrupting the last word. Out of all the voices in the house, it was, perhaps, the only one that had the power to stay his course.

The Lord paused before the door, one gloved fist clenched on the handle.

"You just use us for five years, then go off to die for your own convenience!?" Anger, now.

"How dare you!?" Still, the Lord did not turn.

Silence.

Then, barely above a whisper, trembling, " _Why does everyone have to die?_ "

It wasn't the sort of question a magus would ask - and that was the reason why it drew a reaction. The Lord turned letting go of the door, for the moment, and saw the owner of the voice. She was barely fourteen years old, as of last night.

Tears, few though they were, fell from her face. It was unbecoming of a magus, but if the Lord disapproved, neither his face nor his actions bore testament to it.

"I am not leaving this house to die," he murmured, brushing her tears away, "I am choosing to live."

She laughed, and it was terribly unattractive in the way that all crying laughs are.

"T-there you go with that idiotic philosophy again. But you s-said that you weren't the only choice. So please," the tremolo resolved, "tell me _why_?"

"... It's something I learned, after the previous Head died. From the hero I summoned. Duty is the path of the king. His joys must be greater, his sorrows more profound, his life brighter than that of any common man. But most of all, when his kingdom is threatened, if the king, the king, that greatest of men cannot stand against what would crush his people and end his dreams... who will, Irene? The people must strive, but if their ruler will not show them that path, how will they know the way?

"Magi have forgotten what it means to lead, and so I lead as an example. But of course, you will have already encountered this concept before, in your studies."

The Lord placed one hand on his young Heir's head, and murmured two words that she would never forget.

"Noblesse oblige." _Of those who have much, much is expected._

Then, letting his hand fall to his side, he turned, and cast the door open, and said his last.

"This is what it means to truly follow that path. Mark me: I _will_ return."

Then, leaving everything behind, his fears, his doubts, his worries, he took a step forward, departing from the peaceful, treacherous world he had known, as, for the second time in his life, Lord El-Melloi the Second went to war.

⅌

In the journey to the Clocktower, the Lord of the Archibald allowed himself to relax and slip back into a slightly more natural state of mind. In doing so, a suppressed desire to do anything but walk towards his destination approached the forefront of his mind, but he mastered it with something that, in the past five years, had changed from an absolute effort of will to a thing of practised ease.

He should have died in the Holy Grail War.

He should have met his end at the judgement of Lorelei Barthomeloi.

He should have fallen to any of a number of progressively more insidious plots once he had become El-Melloi in addition to Archibald.

Certainly, he should have died and with certainty, it was not the case that he had. The only thing that set him apart from any of the other upstarts was a commitment to a higher ideal which he had not be born to, but that he had found, edge by edge, until he could hold it in his grasp and know it from every single side. He wondered if that sort of singular nature was shared among all men like him.

From his admittedly meagre experience, he thought that the supposition might be valid. Perhaps even a practical truth - or at least so in the world of Mages, which hailed back to earlier days of humanity.

Arriving at the aboveground entrance to the Clock Tower, disguised as a bizarrely grand employee's entrance to the Museum of Natural History, Waver pulled a brass key from his pocket, and slid it into the door turning it in a direction that should have locked the bolt while he drew three runes - _ansuz_ _sowilo mannaz_ \- against the doors surface. Then, he grasped the handle of the door and opened it onto a hallway that looked for all the world as if it was aboveground, and was actually two hundred meters beneath.

The journey to the symposium chamber was short, from that point onwards. It was designed as such, to prevent individuals from other branches of the Association from seeing more than they had a right to.

He was somewhat amazed that he wasn't the last one there. There were four other individuals there; four Wizard Marshalls.

 _Four_. And this was a group that included Zelretch and Lorelei Barthomeloi.

 _Four of them_.

And... were they... arguing?

Waver paused on the threshold, fascinated.

"Look," said a man in the rear of the room, dressed in a frankly obnoxious amount of red, "I'm not saying the Kaleidoscope isn't a vampire, Edelfelt, I'm saying he's _also_ a man! What you refuse to _get_ \- "

"-is _nothing_ , you degenerate!" Hissed a woman standing off to the left. Her face was young, but her hair was completely white - and all of that was completely drowned out by the little piece of blue and green _wrongness_ hanging from a pendant around her neck.

Of all the people in the chamber, she was the only one he immediately recognized: Aikaterina Edelfelt. Twin sister of the late Wizard Marshall Sannalina Edelfelt, notorious for being one of the Masters of the Third Holy Grail War, for being one of the few to survive a sojourn into the Crystal Valley, and for being the only of that exclusive group to return with a _piece_ of that place. But above everything else, she had infamy for her geological magecraft which tread with one foot in the realm of Life. It should have earnt her a Sealing Designation, and how she had escaped that fate had always been a mystery. Here, apparently, was the answer: she was a Wizard Marshall. And that was a secret so perfectly kept that not even the Archibald had suspected it.

It made a twisted sort of sense, though. If you happened to discover something incredibly dangerous that also just _happened_ to have incredible combat potential, and you were known to be a loyalist, here, perhaps, was a second option.

 _Or,_ Waver thought darkly, _Perhaps she only joined recently, to avenge Sannalina's death._

It was something of an open secret after all, that Wizard Marshalls were most extensively deployed against Dead Apostles.

The argument had continued while the previous flashed across Waver's mind. "- a disgrace! like you, like the foundling, and like that pathetic half-bred excuse of a Lord supposed to be joining this dignified body!" Aikaterina jabbed her finger at the man in red, as if she had just proven some kind of point.

Waver was tempted to step in at the insult, but held himself back, curious in spite of himself as to how the argument would turn out without his interference.

"Degenerate, aye? You know, I don't think I ever shared the reason why Darius gave me to the Enforcer Corps." He flashed a dazzlingly white smile that felt just a _bit_ predatory. "It's because I'm a Terminal of Alaya - useless for his little demonology project, you see. Yeah... _yeah_ , to have a stronger connection to the World than anyone else, why, I _must_ be a mongrel. _**Sterling**_ _logic_ , Aikaterina."

The woman's face went whiter than it already was, "You... You -!"

Enraged beyond words? That was odd, for a magus.

Waver's gaze slid past Edelfelt, and fell on a man who could have been from anywhere in Europe and a few other places besides. He was rubbing his temples, eyes squeezed shut with an expression that could best be described as pained irritation - and somehow, he detected Waver's gaze in the span of a second, and looked up, meeting his eyes before shrugging helplessly.

_See what I have to deal with?_

Feeling perhaps a bit a sympathy, but unwilling to place himself between two human weapons having a verbal dispute, Waver shrugged back, and glanced away. In doing so, he momentarily met eyes with the last of the Marshalls and frowned internally. _He_ was a stripling by magus standards, but she looked to be barely out of her teens. Her hair was an odd, somewhat unplaceable shade of off-black. But none of that was really important, compared to one salient detail. Her eyes were a brilliant - _no,_ _ **metallic**_ \- gold.

And flatly put? That was impossible. That shade did not _ever_ occur in humans. But then again, as far as his sixth sense told him, they weren't Mystic Eyes either. They weren't properly iridescent for that.

Noticing his gaze, she waved, mouthing, 'El-Melloi?'

Waver nodded, and returned the gesture, smiling slightly in spite of himself. Then, her eyes widened by the same marginal degree, and she pointed behind her shoulder. Waver glanced back behind his own...

And his blood all but froze. A figure cloaked in shadows stood, its white, skeletal mask grinning out at him. If it had walked among Kotomine's Assassins from the Fourth War, Waver wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

"Black," the Assassin said in a genderless voice, and held out its hand. Reflexively, Waver offered his own, and they shook. Then, his vision seemed to grow slightly dim, and the Assassin wavered like smoke, and was gone.

As this had happened, the argument had ground to a halt, and suddenly Waver was very aware that every eye in the room was on him. He froze in place for just a moment before he kicked himself into action.

Taking a mental breath that he couldn't permit himself the reality of, he bowed. "Waver Velvet Archibald El-Melloi the Second," he said, "I've been asked to join the Wizards Martial for an upcoming operation."

Rising, he forced himself to maintain a relaxed, albeit formal, posture. The silence stretched out until the red-garbed magus snorted.

"Oh come off it. You aren't fooling any of us. You fake decently for a Lord, but, well - most of them never see true battle." Every word was said with the sort of sneering contempt a Victorian nobleman might save for a leper. Until then, Waver hadn't even known it was _possible_ to put so much derision into one's voice. Almost as an afterthought, the man added, "I am Mathais Duchesne, of the Red."

 _I wonder how I should react to that,_ Waver thought, idly twitching his left index finger and feeling a slight increase in the drain imposed by the cloak on his back.

"A pleasure, I'm sure," Waver said in his driest, "You're right, Marshall Duchesne. Very few of the Lords know any battlefield beyond the political. But -" Coming to a decision, Waver sketched a circle with his ring finger, and continued, "you will find I am _not_ one of them." Then, he raised his right hand, and tapped his jugular with affected idleness.

Mathais reached up, and felt his neck, his fingers coming away beaded with mercury. His eyes widened slightly, and seeing that the message was received, Waver twitched his fingers again, and that, and the ring of liquid metal around the Wizard Marshall's neck evaporated, flowing back through the air and into his cape at all the speed that a vaporised gas allowed.

"Now, do you desist in your insults, or will I have to challenge you under the Code Duello in the defence of my and mine's honour?"

And despite years of experience in dealing with life and death situations, Waver could help but feel the barest frisson of terror at the possible answer to that question.

The Red stared at him for a second. Then, a smile broke out on his face and he said, "Not brave, but actually courageous. Good control of reaction. Not afraid to fight dirty. Savvy enough to keep to the forms even when pushed. Hah. Guess Lorelei really _does_ know how to pick 'em. No - duel's unnecessary. 'specially if this operation requires all of us. _I recant my accusation and beg your forgiveness_ ," The Red intoned, reciting the ancient form of the Code, then clapped his hands together, seemingly unworried that Waver might reject the recantation – and with good reason. "All right! Am I the only one of us who plans to introduce himself!?"

That seemed to kick off some sort of informal ceremony, as every other member began to name themselves in turn.

"Edelfelt, Aikaterina. White." The moment her introduction was done, she turned her head, determinedly looking at _anything_ but him.

"Avesta, I'm Viridian and Gold." The girl with the demonic eyes said, in something between a murmur and regular speech.

"Magnus Dragomirov," A giant of a man, nearly as tall as Rider said, his English thick with an unplaceable accent. "The Unifying Grey, they call me."

And then, completely unexpectedly:

"Barthomeloi Lorelei," a strident voice declared, "The Transparent."

There was a silent stirring of the air currents in the room, as The Director and Lorelei Barthomeloi emerged from a pocket of distortion in the midst of the the other members of the Wizards Martial. Though it was _obviously_ magecraft, it had been entirely invisible to Waver's senses.

"Temanekona Laifasz. The Colourless!" Laifasz yelled, gesturing grandly with an ebony cane with a suspiciously large diamond on top of it.

 _Well, that fits,_ Waver thought, remembering the Director's eyes.

And then, he felt pinned by a gaze. Following the source of the sensation, he found himself looking into Lorelei's harsh blue eyes.

"Five years ago, I spared your life, and created you the Second Lord of El-Melloi," Lorelei said, "Have you come here today to repay that debt?"

"Of course not," Waver said, rejecting the supposition out of hand, "I came here because of my own philosophy."

"Hm. Then you are still the man I spared." The Vice Director barely nodded, and her serious expression softened by a commensurate degree. "I would have been most disappointed had you answered in the affirmative."

She turned around sharply, walking up and onto the dais at the back of the room and gazing out at the others. "This is the situation. Two years ago, one of our early warning systems, in specific, one from long before the Mage's Association was formally established detected a change in the Indus Valley -"

And then, someone cleared their throat. Loudly.

Every head in the room turned to Dragomirov, and for a moment before he spoke, the silence was uncomfortable and intense.

"As much as I enjoy your... usual manner of briefing," Magnus began, "Can we cut to the chase? I need to return to my posting at the Department of Cosmological Ideology," he said, then rattled something off in Russian, " _Sushchestvuyetzapusk segodnya, vy znayete._ "

"It is not more important than this, Marshall Dragomirov. Of that, I can assure you." The dismissal was clear, but what was more interesting was how the man reacted to it - a simple raised eyebrow, and not even a hint of the previous impatience and irritation.

"Very well. Then continue."

"The system detected an instability in the containment of a certain conceptual phenomena. Given that this instability is set to peak in conjunction with the precise moment of sunset we have assumed that this represents an attempt by the phenomena to break containment. While it never had the chance to exert its effects on Earth when it initially appeared, The Director of the Mage's Association has communicated to me that is would be... bad."

"Bad," Duchesne echoed. "Want to quantify that?"

"Qliphoth. Class Samael." Lorelei replied. Waver didn't recognize the system of classification, but from how the room reacted...

The Red muttered a curse, the Viridian blanched, and the White grew taut and tense. The only persons in the room that Waver could definitively say were unaffected by it were the Director and the Grey, and the former had certainly already known. It was something that disturbed some of the most dangerous humans alive. That was answer enough.

And in spite of that, the pace of the meeting barely slowed.

"Where do we go to stop it?" Aikaterina asked.

"Site IV," Laifasz replied, this time, "Located in the Indus River Valley,"

The room broke out into collective murmurs at that, as Waver tried to remember where that place-name had come up, and drew a complete blank, despite a _damn_ strong feeling that it was important, somehow. The feeling was vindicated moment later, when -

"So - the true origin of the Indo-Europeans..." Avesta murmured at his side. Waver nearly started. The girl didn't carry any sort of presence at all. "Interesting, don't you think?"

"If what you're saying is known true..." Waver said, voice low, " _terrifying_ would be the adjective I'd use, Marshall Avesta. I've seen men from the Age of the Gods. I never wanted to encounter anything from the Dawn Era."

She smiled, brightly. "And you're still coming along! I'd say that's the most interesting thing about this entire situation, wouldn't you?"

"Enough." Lorelei said. The word wasn't any louder than conversational, but the room fell silent at speed.

"According to our intelligence, the moment of opportunity to replace that seal comes at sunset. This will occur in thirty minutes and -"

Laifasz cut Lorelei off, "- as such? We are _going_!" The Director shouted, twirling the ebony cane, " _IN!_ ", suddenly, Laifasz's grip shifted, until it held the bottom of the cane like a baseball bat - " _ **STYLE!**_ " - and swung.

There was a flash of searing prismatized light that burned throughout itself on a conceptual level below motion, and a shattering noise.

What appeared when Waver's sight cleared was simply more bizarre.

There stood cracks in the air, and shards of spacetime lay on the floor, somehow physical, impossibly perceivable. Or should that be reversed? The Director stood still, holding the blasted remains of the cane in his hands. Then, his shoulders slumped.

"... _still?_ " Laifasz muttered, before tossing the remains of the cane through the hole in space. At which point it moved in every direction simultaneously, and vanished. And then was briefly superimposed on every atom atom in the room in the room. Atom in the room. Atom in the room. ATOM IN THE R-

And then after a moment of discontinuity in the minds of all present, it was gone again - and this time forever.

The Director stared at the hole he had smashed in reality.

The void stared right back.

" _Well_ then! The keys it is. Bloody second magic. Bloody crystals. Bloody fractures in the deepest levels of space-time. Bloody blood."

As the Director continued muttering a stream of increasingly bizarre and meaningless invective, he reached within the sleeves of his robe and pulled out a set of... Well, they looked absolutely nothing like keys in any sense. Except that they did. Except that they didn't. They weren't shaped like keys, but they weren't shaped like not-keys. No - that wasn't quite right. It was more that they conformed to the essential _shape_ of the concept _key_ , but were just... not...

Waver blinked. Glanced at the small azure pendant that hung around the Lady Edelfelt's neck. Connected the ideas.

"They're from another World, aren't they?" Waver murmured.

The Director paused, and then, Waver had the notion he was smiling.

" _Yes_. You'll find that we deal with them... rather _frequently_."

The bottom dropped out of Waver's stomach.

"Says the bleedin' immortal," Mathais murmured, having moved to Waver's shoulder just as silently as the Gold had, "Last time it happened was in the 1700's. Before that, 800's. Before that, bloody _**moonfall**_ _,_ an' that was just a mop-up job. Chin up, this'll be boring. Probably."

Laifasz, meanwhile, had located a single 'key' - this one made of a tarnished silver metal that reflected light in several impossible ways that Waver tried not to think too much about - which he held out before himself. After adjusting its orientation in a way that hurt the eyes of everyone present, he slid it right into the air, the blade of the key disappearing as it moved forward. There were a series of shifts in the spatial conformation of the room giving birth to a bounded field that was, to Waver's sixth sense, the same colour as the key. Then, The Director slowly turned the key...

And at two points of the field, they were no longer in the antechamber. Somehow... _somehow_ , two slices of somewhere outside had been cut into the air, and as the key turned, the edges spun around the circle, rewriting their location from the Clock Tower to somewhere else.

Finally,

Avesta's face had gone pale.

Gaia opened to them.

  


  


##  **Site IV  
Arrival**

  


Spirits - natural spirits, at any rate - are made by the world as a sense. If Gaia is the Mind of the World, then it might be said that Spirits are its body - that by which the mind knows that it is more than a mind.

The analogy is poor, but necessarily so, for Gaia is a World and the life which inhabits it - and thus is _all_ and _one_. Humans, who exist only by segregating those two natures - _all_ into Alaya, _one_ into themselves - could never hope to understand such. At least, not intuitively. But with time, some of the mess of incomprehensibility built into an alien mind can be untangled, and so magi say that Spirits are used by Gaia as a sense of touch, while their cousins, the Demon Kind, are used to serve another purpose, and so forth.

But Spirits are the most important sense, because _Touch_ , in the case of Gaia, is also _proprioception_ \- the ability to know the shape of oneself, as well as the shape of others; to know where the universe ends, and she begins.

 _Spirits are everywhere_. Strong spirits are rare, of course; being equivalent to _hands_ \- organs that both touch the world, and manipulate it. But tiny spirits? Spirits without form, without identity? Spirits that are barely more than air?

Animism exists for a _reason,_ and the reason that it stands as the root of all religion is the _same._ Like bundles of nerve fibre connected only to other nerves, these spirits exist not to change the world, but to send it one simple message, from itself and to itself - forever.

_Here, I am._

But there are some places in the world, where even spirits dare not tread.

"Welcome," Lorelei said, "To Site _Indus Valley_."

It was manifestly unimpressive - a barren ruin. Ancient bronze-age wrecks dotted the valley floor around them, but only one was even marginally intact - a slender tower not more than five stories tall, that stood in a circular zone of exclusion that none of the other structures trespassed. The only thing that the site couldn't be faulted for was its scale. Wherever this place was, Waver thought, it was large by the standards of its age.

But that didn't change the fact that it was dead, and long past gone.

"...I really don't like this place," Avesta said, "It's wrong."

"Of course it's wrong," the Red said, "If it weren't, why would we even be wasting time here?"

"More than usual. This place isn't anywhere."

Aikaterina scowled. "Will you two half-breeds _please_ shut up? _Some_ of us are actually -"

"I... agree." Magnus said, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps intentionally cutting Aikaterina off. "This place feels too much like the inside of my head."

The Grey's comment was met with the sort of silence that comments are met with when they make the person commenting sound insane.

Waver stood apart from the Wizard Marshalls, paying only minimal attention to their conversation. He had never shut off his sixth sense, and now he was seeing something that he couldn't quite understand. It was like the landscape was continually flowing away from and into itself. Shutting the sense down, the effect disappeared instantaneously, and an absurd thought occurred to him.

So, bringing his circuits to life, he decided to test it.

_Awaken. Select parameters 9-3-0. Instantiate Shell. Commit._

A small corona of blue light formed around his left hand, and a trail of faint arcanochromatic sparks were blown from it, as if by an invisible wind. His mouth opened slightly, in shock. _That should_ _ **not**_ _happen_.

And there was only one explanation for it. He shook his head and announced, "The world itself is moving here."

"Excellent deduction, Lord El-Melloi!" The Director said, "Ten points to Gryffindor!"

Perfect silence. Absolute nonreaction.

"Why do I even _bother_ learning pop culture if nobody else..." The Director shook its head sharply. "Doesn't matter. All right. Yes - as Lord El-Melloi said, the world... storms around this point. As for why? We stand upon the conceptual axis of Gaia itself. A few steps further in, and we'd be, hm, _off the map_ , I suppose. In a nowhere place. A piece of Earth..." Laifasz paused, letting expectation fill the air, "That is _not_ Earth."

"Neato," Mathais said, murdering the tension "So, what do we have to kill here that needs six of us and a temp?"

"Five of you, Marshall Duchesne, and El-Melloi won't be a part of it," Lorelei said, stepping to the front of the group and facing them, "Myself, the Director, and..." Her eyes glanced over to Waver, flickering with faint amusement. "...the _temp,_ as you call him, will be out of the picture. While we do as we must, you're to kill anything and everything that tries to stop us. The Director believes that Gaia _will_ retaliate, and I... trust his judgement in this matter."

An easy grin broke out over Mathais' face, "Well, all _right_ then. I've got your back, Avesta's got my back, Aika _worships_ your back -" he leaned a few centemetres back, dodging a shard of crystal meant to lobotomise him - "Blackie likes to kill, and Magnus is just a nice guy." He threw a quick glance back at Magnus, "Aren't ya?"

Magnus shrugged, the ghost of a smile flickering over his face. "Generosity radiates from my every pore."

"We've got your back. Go save the world, sunshine."

⅌

Waver was beginning to think that the Vice Director's reputation for having a hair-trigger temper might've been undeserved. After Duchesne had made that particular, absolutely _insane_ comment, she had simply nodded, turned around, and began to walk towards the tower. Laifasz shrugged, and after murmuring something brief to Duchesne began to follow her, leaving Waver to take up the rear. It was only after having crossed about ten metres that Waver noticed thousand upon thousands of tiny incisions cut into everything around him.

The air around Lorelei was subtly lensed into countless tiny, wavering distortions, moving around and twitching like invisible hairs caught up in a phantasmal wind. Slowly, as they got closer to the decrepit ruin, the phenomena contracted, lessened, and finally vanished with a barely audible snap.

Waver swallowed. What he had just seen hadn't seemed to cost Lorelei any more effort than clenching and unclenching a fist, and yet... If a human had been within that radius. He swallowed again.

Perhaps... Just perhaps, the reputation was not ill-deserved at all.

Slightly ahead, both Lorelei and Director Laifasz had come to a stop. Matching their location, Waver did as well.

"Beyond here, the speed of the World's rotation begins to become unhealthy for individuals with your level of ability. A few centimetres beyond that point, and it becomes damaging to us all. Now would be a good time for you to cast the entropic canceller," said Laifasz.

"All right. Just a..." Waver moved his right thumb back, fed a substantial amount of prana into the same hand's glove, and pointed at himself - a third of the prana vanished, and then, a very weak drain registered - Laifasz - another third vanished, the drain increased - and Lorelei - the last third, and the drain trebled to a level where he wouldn't be able to hold it for more than a few hours.

"Done," Waver said, "We can proceed."

"Then let's move." Laifasz.

Waver took one step, and felt the drain increase slightly, then another, and this time, it stayed level at the higher amount - non-newtonian reflexivity had something to be said for it, after all. Waver made a note to himself to place a formal commendation for... who was it again? Eigenstadt? It didn't matter.

As he took another step, he felt an immense, gentle pressure that was belied by the _visible_ prana ablating off the edges of his spell. Chancing it, he flicked his sixth sense on, and looked around.

What he saw was disturbing.

The ground was real, in the physical sense, but the world spun around it, never filling it with presence. Everything here was eternally being torn apart and recomposed. Nothing ever settled. This wasn't a storm. This was a silent maw worrying at the flesh of existence. And then -

And then they were through. The lighting was dim - it was the very edge of nightfall, the disc of the sun braced against the valley walls.

The ground here was barren, and absolutely dead. There was no mana within it, or the air, or the Tower.

Waver tried to take a breath, and found he couldn't. There was no World here. The concept of air was invalid. The concept of breath was invalid. The only thing he had was himself, and...

And somehow, that was enough?

Without air it shouldn't have been possible, but nevertheless, he spoke, "I suppose that was what you needed me for?"

Lorelei glanced back, and the faintest inclination of her head was the only acknowledgement that he got.

"Then I'll wait here. It's probably for the best that I don't see whatever's inside." _Though it would answer the question of how a crumbling tower bears the fate of the world,_ he didn't add, though he was sorely tempted to. He had expected... something else. Something more; from a civilisation that lived in the age of Gilgamesh. But -

The Director broke that train of thought with his reply.

"No. I'm sorry, but the choice has already been made. You're coming with us."

"If I could ask," Waver began, but his feet were already moving. It felt... inevitable. "Why?"

"Because you've already come with us. You're asking a question that treads with both feet in the realm of magic - _True_ Magic. The proximate cause is because I believe that your entropic canceller - or rather, _an_ entropic canceller - is a necessary condition for us to survive not just what came before, but what lies ahead. But the ultimate cause is that several minutes from now, you've entered the Road with us, and you've crossed the territory it traverses. If you don't go _now_ , where we can control the why and how, you _will_ at some point in the future, where we can't. Where there won't be a Road to breath Destination into that place. Only a world of endless shade. Just about anything you could imagine would be a kinder fate."

 _Both feet in the realm of magic? That was completely incomprehensible,_ Waver thought - but then again, wasn't Magic infamous for being such?

As they climbed the tower, Waver felt his heartbeat minutely quicken, even though there was no air for it to draw upon.

Then, at last, they reached the top.

It was underwhelming. Stone, dust, two pillars standing tall, facing directly towards a break in the wall of the tower that beheld wall of the valley.

"Now," Laifasz said, as he reached into his robes and withdrew a pocket watch, "A bit of trivia, while we wait. Something that the mundane geologists will never understand. The valley wall - the one you see through the pillars? That was done by human hand. Magecraft of the Dawn Era. The work of two men. _That_ is how far magecraft has fallen."

The Director flicked the cover open, and Waver caught glimpse of it. It held the image of a sunset engraved with beautiful simplicity, the sparse lines somehow conveying everything of worth about the scene - reality as ephemera. But, there was one, tiny detail, at the centre... that couldn't... _quite_...

Abruptly, the symbol unfolded in his mind along with images that made no real sense - time like light frozen in a field of endless stone - branching paths of luminescent splines growing in size as they parasitised energy from the concept of possibility - sunlight, sleeting down from a blue star and being refracted through layers upon layers of something that looked and felt like stained glass and frozen quasi-real wave functions at the same time - and then, just as suddenly, the unfolding, completely uninterpretable schema vanished, and was replaced with a chain of nonsense syllables, the signature of an alien God.

They strung together like so: Ia-da-ba-la-oth

Shaking his head, Waver wiped at a slight trickle of warmth on his lip, and wasn't pleased to see blood - but he wasn't surprised either. Moments later, the drop was burnt away by an innate function of his gloves. The Director didn't notice the short episode, too busy watching the hands of the pocketwatch intently and tapping the ground at a regular pace just ever so slightly discordant with the actual length of a second.

At last, Laifasz said, "All right. Six score and three to go. Now, Director El-Melloi, listen _carefully_. We will be crossing through another world to reach our destination and fortunately, the bridge was made with such journeys in mind. It will shield us from the deepest nature of the realm we will be travelling through... but it is _not_ perfect. Etu is a frighteningly absolute place, and within it, nothing can ever reach completion. Not truly. So... Do not be surprised if your memories of the journey are disorganised and verging nonsensical. Do not be surprised if you remember nothing of it at all. And whatever you do? Do not. stray. from. the path. Or you will be lost beyond any _hope_ of salvation."

Laifasz took a deep breath. " _Now_." He held his hand out at the dais, and made a negligent gesture. At once, the stone of the columns vanished, and Waver was confronted with a substance that he hadn't seen for six years, save in his worst dreams. Here was the same material that had made the Sword of Rupture's blade. A substance stronger than the Earth, to support a bridge that could cross worlds.

In his shock, he almost missed the words Laifasz spoke next, _did_ miss the last one.

" **Road to...** "

At the last, unintelligible word that the Director had spoken, an asymmetrical blood-red crystal folded out of the air between the two pillars, hovered in place for a few moments, then fell to the ground. Only, instead of striking the surface, it fell into it, violating every law of perspective as it stopped just beneath the depth of the floor without ever crossing its boundary.

And then, another sight fit for the close of the Fourth Grail war. There was a blinding flash of crimson light, and a road in the shade of blood arced forward across the ground, growing, propagating with branches that looked like the first aeons of the Tree of Life until it reached the valley's wall -

\- and then continued onwards, violating perspective _again_ , somehow moving further away than the valley wall was without ever actually _reaching_ it.

"Now, shall we begin?" The Director said, and stepped onto The Road. Lorelei followed without hesitation, and, after only the barest moment, Waver fell in behind.

 

 

 

* * *

Echoes of knowledge and of innocence lost,  
of a race for transcendence, no matter the cost,  
of fiery wrath, of ambition struck down,  
of thundering and sundering, of a world without sound.

  
Knowledge and gnosis, comprehension though pain,  
by the sword of the star and made whole again,  
now at the end, brought before truth again,  
a path upon which all would rend!

* * *

 

  


  


##  **Outside the Tower**

  


"You are a fool. ORT isn't even comparable to the Demon Kind, unless you go so far as to include Primordial Demons in that definition - at which point all systems of classification break down. Such shallow conceptualization is expected of a _bastard_ like you, Duchesne."

"Hah! You know, I've always wondered something, Aikaterina. You know how genetics work. For your little tricks with viruses, you _have_ to. So I'm curious, then, why you're so proud of your lineal purity, when it _actually means that you're inbre-_ "

A torrent of coherent light burst from the tower, completely disregarding solidity as it painted the world in bloody luminance.

In the same instant, prana flooded the air in such immense quantities that Mathais felt, for the smallest moment, as if he stood upon the surface of the sun.

Then, both the light and the prana passed, leaving only a dim crimson glow from the top of the tower, and a razor-thin line of bloody luminance racing away from it, until it touched the valley walls.

Mathais murmured, "What the _hell_ was that?"

"I don't know. But, Mathais?" Avesta.

Mathais glanced back at the Gold.

"Yeah?"

"Gaia is _furious_." She whispered. "I've been in some of the worst industrial complexes in the world, and I thought - I thought _that_ was Gaia's standard for rage, but..." She shivered, "This goes beyond human emotion. This goes beyond language. She's coming."

Mathais nodded.

"Well then, everyone -" he glanced around, as, in the heart of night, myriad voices of beasts that were more than mere wolves began to howl.

"Let's get ready to dance."

  


  


##  **Upon the Road**

  


As they walked down the path, the world around them somehow... unfolded. At the same time, it grew _dim_. Gravity seemed to shift slightly, away from the ground beneath them, and towards wherever it led.

Then, they reached where the valley wall should have been. And walking on, it grew larger instead of closer, the final centimetres between them and the wall expanding to keep a constant, tiny gap between material and subjective reality as the world grew titanic. Every shadow deepened, as every patch of light began to slowly die.

As they walked into the cracks in the fabric of the world, and out of it, moments began to blur together, and thought; boundaries fell apart and were erased, concepts ceased to be entities of immutable truth and instead simply became ideas held together by the weak force of their own attraction.

Finally, they crossed some point of terminal liminality, and

The thread, split.

The sun, set.

The world, changed.

  


  


  


##  **In the Without  
of All Completion**

  


Later, after years of intermittent work to make sense of the sensory explosion that had occurred in the unmoment between the fading of the valley walls and their arrival, Waver Velvet could remember this:

Waver, The Director, and Lorelei walked down a crimson path. Transfinite darkness consumed everything, and yet there were _shapes_ in the dark. It wasn't a world of black, but of endless shade, and it was silent.

' _No_ ,' Waver thought, ' _It's not silent here. This place is eating the sound._ '

Waver paused briefly, and stared out into the featureless void - but was void even the right word? This place... _it seethed_ , silently, aching to _become_. This place felt like a tightly coiled spring and -

\- and Waver saw something move in the ocean of night.

It was fast. Quiet. Eerily lifelike.

It arced out into his peripheral vision, and reflexively, his eyes followed it, tracing shapes and contours that weren't there, but still could be perceived.

 **Stop this**.

Slowly, a form began to emerge from the depthless liminality of the place... And it was reaching out to him. It wasn't possible. It wasn't _real_. It was _too_ real. This

**stop this**

was a thing that stood outside of necessity. Nothing needed it, and therefore it wasn't - but it was. And it wanted to _be_. Waver thought he heard a small, pitiful voice cry, " _Help me! Please."_

_stop... this..._

And barely aware of what he was doing, Waver whispered, "Okay. Just take my-"

A rough, weathered hand placed itself on his shoulder, and the moment snapped. Waver found himself staring into the mass of shifting shadows that served as Laifasz's face. "Eyes," The man said, pointing to the pillar of red at the Road's terminus, "On the prize. Don't look at the shadows, and for the sake of your fathers, don't _listen_ to them."

And then, as they walked through the purgatory of Etu, of _Inchoata Prime_ there was a sound which should not have been. The sound itself was fairly uninteresting in its basic nature - just a human voice humming a slightly disjoint melody. What was eerie was that it was entirely unaccounted for and...

"I know that tune..." Lorelei murmured. And took another step. And found herself in a moment of inverted colour and concept, a shattered and frozen still.

An elderly man, dressed in a brown, double-breasted overcoat with a scarf around his neck, upside down and walking on no path, walked up to, and then _through_ The Director.

"Hail! I return at last, and not as a player, but as a piece upon the board; oh, I acknowledge no King!"

He shouldn't be able to remember this.

So that begged the question: _why did he?_

Sometimes there were three, sometimes there was one, and sometimes there were thousands.

  


One of them said, "So what I'm saying is, it's hilarious. Greece fades, Rome copies it. Rome fades, Europe copies it. Everything that fails and dies in this world, and the Human Kind adopts it using beautiful ideals like nobility, while all the time meaning, ' _This is the corpse of grandeur, and we worship its decaying flesh_.' Heh, hahahahahaha!"

"I don't see the humour," the other said sullenly.

"Of course you wouldn't. You never knew what the world was like, before people learned that _word_."

The silent one walked on in silence, trying desperately not to hear the whispers that never were.

Who is the sky?

_Tick_. _Tick. Tick. Tick._

The Director drew to a stop, and sighed. "Haven's fall."

Reaching into a pocket of his robe, he drew out the stopwatch, which was utterly changed. The cover was missing, and its internal structures were exposed. Though he was no expert, Waver could tell from the sheer intricacy of the mechanism that it ran with great precision.

It was, however, running backwards - and the time was thirty seven minutes to midnight, in reverse.

"It seems as if we came too late. Something made it to -" the word was lost "- before we did. It was already unstable, but now, we have to _move_ , with all due haste, and possibly at the cost of all wise precaution. I'm going to shorten the path - we'll arrive in one more step, but be warned: It will _not_ be pleasant. Lord El-Melloi, if you could furnish us with that most wonderful bit of thaumaturgy again? I am afraid we may need it..."

Waver nodded.

"Cast with your mind, this time." Laifasz commanded. "Then, on the count of three. Lorelei, be ready to break our fall."

_Awaken. Select parameters 9-2-27-1 - instantiate shell. Locate ego, sympathize. Target: "Temanekona Laifasz" (Unknown), "Barthomeloi Lorelei" (Almighty), Waver Velvet (self/Erosion)._

"Three!" The Director shouted, his hand bracing against the air. Tiny pieces of crimson light flew through the air, fading - _being consumed_ , Waver realized - and being reborn every second.

_Acquired. Acquired. Acquired. Program committed._

"Two!"

And in that moment, The Director demonstrated exactly _why_ he had managed to effectively control the magi of the world for over two thousand years.

"TARU! ANNA! KI'AM!"

It was brute evocation, and a spell beneath the level of a single action. The result was so fine, it might've been cast by a great ritual: A webwork of red crystal turned out of space, rotating into existence, and shooting forward down the perspective-violating path of the Road. Beneath their feet, the soft crimson light became harsh, and bright, and from before them, light surged forth

_Execute._

And in the next moment, the world rushed forth to meet them, burning concepts - alien, but _not wrong_ slamming through him with irresistible force.

 **welcome home**  
(Round 3. Tiebreaker. Start.)

_And then there was one._

  


  


##  _**Unknown. Unrecalled. Unnamed.  
Unformed. Unborn. **__**Undying.**_ _ **Unending.**_

  


And in the last moment of a time lost from history, which would never come to completion, in a sky that held no stars, the Road opened in an explosion of furious crimson light. From it, three figures fell, tiny against the scale of this place.

For just a moment, it appeared for all the world as if they had simply been cast from the Road, and into the shadows of Etu. Then, a wave of darkness receded from the opening point, outpacing the falling figures and then casting an unfamiliar valley as if it were an infinitely malleable cloth being draped over an endlessly complex form. The dark seeped into reality, and made shapes against the structures of concepts lost to memory.

In silence, one of the tiny figures falling into the world shot ahead of the others, and spun around managing to just barely catch the other two in a lens of wind, turning their fall into a controlled descent. Mastering the unbelievable strain of casting her will against the world with nothing but Od, Lorelei Barthomeloi decelerated as slowly as she possibly could, as for the first time in decades, she felt actual heat from her Magic Circuits.

After several minutes of increasingly exhausting effort, she was the first to make contact with the Earth, followed by El-Melloi and the Director. They had touched down near the edges of one of the valley walls. As the other two got their bearings, she leaned over, hands on her knees, and slowly mastered the weakness inherent in suddenly running a 39 degree fever.

When the minor thaumaturgy in her clothes had returned her temperature to a level low enough that her body was no longer threatening to fail her, she walked over to the edge and gazed down upon what had never been.

She felt El-Melloi join her a moment later. What was written on his face as he stared up into the shattered sky was shock... and recognition.

  


  


##  **As Waver Saw It**

  


He had managed to get a proper shield around the Director and Lorelei, but his own had been insufficient to the task. Under the onslaught of transition into an alien world, it cracked, and then shattered. There was a burst of cacophonous light, as the Road to Babel nearly broke against the strain of what had been done to it. Then, in an instant, it was gone, and a darkling nova blasted the shadows of Etu away from them.

He was falling, but that wasn't a problem. He could survive, he just had to use Volumen Hydrargyrum to...

_System error. Alaya Disconnected. Gaia Nonexistent. Path to Code: Unfound._

For an instant, Waver feared for his life. In the next, Lorelei, her face locked in an expression of absolute concentration shot past them, and somehow managed to take control of their fall. Wind blasted past them with furious speed, slowing their fall into a controlled descent. Moments later, they made Earthfall, and they all paused to gather their wits, and in Lorelei's case, her strength. Waver silently walked over to the edge of the plateau they had alighted on and looked out, taking in the scope of this place...

And he shuddered. Whatever this was, _it wasn't a part of Gaia or Alaya_.

Waver felt a certain ineffable _something_ slide into pace, and completed a thought that hadn't felt like it was lacking anything: _even though it was still of Earth_.

It wasn't part of Gaia or Alaya, even though it was still of Earth.

That wasn't possible. That was absurd. That wasn't even a logical contradiction; it was outside logic. The surface of the world was accounted for and belonged to the Worlds! This place had nowhere to be rooted, but...

But somehow, that wasn't a problem here.

Waver looked down, into the depths of the valley, and saw what was to be seen.

It was night; and in the far distance was a tattered spire of blue flame. It was almost impossible to tell its actual size, but at the very least, it was the equal of any modern skyscraper. Fragments of blue fire dotted the landscape, and although it was impossible to tell, Waver felt a gut-deep certainty that they had come from the pillar of flame dominating the landscape, that once, the blue-white spire had been taller.

In all cases, the fire did not burn, but moved in slow motion, occasionally leaping back and forth between different states, but never quite managing to move past a certain point in its evolution.

Flowing out of the flames, mist that glowed pale poured _up_ , clinging to the valley walls, as if trapped between air and stone.

There were places where the world was broken. Where the air was fractured, behind it was nothing. And some of those holes were shaped like humans, moving forward, and backward through the same processions that the flames followed, but at random intervals, as disconnected as the fires were synchronised.

Occasionally, there were flashes of light, serpentine fractures in the fabric of reality tearing apart the world and reforming it, as they passed motion against the stillness - mysteries of thaumaturgy lost to the ocean of time between the calamity recorded in the very air, and the moment, _now_ , when he saw it.

And then there was the _sky_.

He looked up, up, up, _up_ , into a jagged patch nothing - and with dawning horror, he realized that he _knew_ that shade of void - he had seen it once before. On Bucephalus. Riding towards a King of Heroes, as a world was torn to shreds and tatters.

But that had been a counterfeit reality.

 _This_ was the world that was - this _was_ Earth.

And something had murdered the world.

"This is..." he began, but his voice died off. There weren't really words that could carry his emotion, in any language. _Ea_ , _were you born here?_

"Leaves you speechless, doesn't it?" The voice of The Director came from his side. Waver nodded. "Even after all this time, I still don't know precisely what caused it. You know, one day, everything was fine - we were in full contact with them. The next..."

The man - and yes, Waver realized, he _was_ a man - stepped forward, no longer cloaked in distortion - whereon he beheld the dead city with dull red eyes, and sighed. "...a history ended. Another began. The planet continued to turn. From thus."

The group stood, on the edge of the Indus Valley that had been lost to history, silent.

And then, Waver broke that silence, as a single idea burned its way to the top of his mind.

"You... look like Gilgamesh."

The Director glanced back at him, his face old and lined harshly with the traces of age, and shrugged, barely, as if it was the least important thing in the world.

"I should. I'm his grandfather."

  


  


  


##  **Site IV  
** **Incipit**

  


The first of Gaia's was a Monstrous Beast that might have been what would have happened if you had hybridized a nemean lion with an auroch for a few dozen centuries using magecraft. Mathais flicked his thumb at the beast. A moment later Black materialized and, in a single thrust, tore the giant creature's heart from its chest. The nameless creature fell to the ground, twitched slightly, then bled out.

After six or seven more nameless beasts crossed into range, and were similarly dispatched, there was a lacuna of several seconds. Then, ever-so-slightly, the ground began to tremble.

"All right," Mathais said, his voice a deadly shade of calm that carried absolute authority. "All... right. Avesta, ETA."

"Forty seconds."

"That much? Got it, listen up. Aikaterina. Director says that the storm around the tower should be gone while they do what they need to. Go there, reinforce the structural elements. Break non load-bearing walls, ranged support. Now!"

"Black. I want you to set up a Circle and give ownership to Magnus. Magnus, cut them out of Gaia. After that, frontline support."

"Avesta... Realistically, do you have any chance of being able to tap the Gold without -"

"Probably not. I can siphon mana, _maybe_ , but if I got too close to that line, now? Gaia would use me to stab you in the back."

"Then fire support with Aikaterina."

"And you?"

"I am what I am. You know what I was _made_ for."

Avesta nodded, and ran off to the tower just as one of the walls blew off. Just as she reached the entrance, she shouted, "Hey Mathais!"

"Yeah?"

"You'd better not die!"

"Damn straight!"

Exactly thirty nine seconds had passed. Mathais spun back to the walls of the valley, and at that very moment, the riot of nature herself crested them, and began to boil downhill.

Mathais began to laugh, heart surging with joy. Yes. Yes! This, right here was what he was born for.

" _Battre encore, mon cœur,_ " he murmured, humming as a thousand cursed lineages and chained spirals of desire without release came to life in his flesh, "I'll skin you all, one by one!"

And then, the Red charged forth with abandon that should have been recklessness, to meet the surging tide.

  


  


##  **On the Other Side**

  


"Utnapishtim." Waver said, testing out the name. He had learnt it when he had looked into the history of the King of Heroes. A man who had become a god, and the hero of the Sumerian flood myths.

"Of course," that selfsame man replied, "Didn't you see it in Temanekona Laifasz?"

"... _No_?"

"A corruption of the Gujarati for 'He Who Saw Life', which is incidentally, my name in the tongue of Sumer. I had thought with your preference for obscure Indo-Aryan curses..." The Director trailed off. "It's not important; though you will understand that I am not asking for your silence when we return. I'm imposing it."

 _And_ _ **there's**_ _where the Golden King got his attitude from_ , Waver thought.

"So you're a divine spirit -" Waver began, and then was cut off.

" _No_." It was said with such hate and vehemence that Waver found himself taking an involuntary step back. "I am a man become God. There's a difference. Mark it."

"On that," Lorelei began, and the man who had called himself Temanekona Laifasz transferred his scowl to her, "The difference?"

"Divine Spirits," Utnapishtim ground out, "are what humans call the class of spiritual being that are supported by the desires of the world. _Gods are that we_ _ **are**_ _._ Does that about answer your question, Vice Director?"

Without waiting for a response, Utnapishtim leapt down the valley walls, traversing the impossible grade with inhuman skill and dexterity - _literally_ inhuman, Waver noted, watching the motions of his descent. They were perfectly calibrated to put the man's body where it needed to be, but the motions looked like they had been designed by some algorithm that thought of the human body as an amalgamation of physical objects instead of an interconnected whole.

Waver glanced over at Lorelei. While he had been taken by the sheer beauty and horror of the place, he had noticed her leaning against her knees, there at the beginning. She almost looked completely unruffled. Almost. There was an errant bead of sweat on her left temple though. He missed the faint trace of perplexion on her face entirely.

"Shall we follow him?" Waver asked.

Lorelei responded by beginning to walk forward.

The valley wall was too steep to be walked down, which meant...

Exploiting the lack of barrier between himself and the world, Waver seized a portion of the dominant energy in the air, and fused the smallest portion of it that he could reasonably handle with his od. It was... amazingly compatible. Better, by far, than mana itself - it _wanted_ to accede to his will, to become what he commanded of it.

"Vice Director," Waver began, remembering how exhausted she had looked, and trying to phrase his idea in a way that wouldn't hurt her pride. "I should like to have the honour of conveying us both down with my family's Mystic Code. May I?"

It was just good sense. Lorelei was far better equipped to deal with any dangers they found here than he was. If he could spare her trivial efforts, it was better for them all in the long run.

The Vice Director slowed for a moment, then came to a full halt. Finally, she seemed to reach the same conclusion he had and nodded. "Of course. I would not turn down so generous an offer from one of my allies. Show me your art, Lord El-Melloi."

And so Waver held his hands out before him, and with several twitches of his fingers, produced the _Volumen_ from his cape, and with motions that hybridized the plucking of strings and the striking of imaginary keys, directed it to form under their feet, and to begin descending down the valley wall. A few moments later, they were moving at considerable speed.

"An interesting method of controlling a Mystic Code," Lorelei noted, watching the motions of Waver's hands with faint interest.

"It was never made for me," Waver said, "I had to get inventive, or lose its potential." The material intelligence stored inside _Volumen_ was _beautiful_ work, almost as good as a living thing, superior in that it could simply flow into the correct shape to counter for any mistakes it made - or, for that matter, that _he_ made.

Lorelei chose not to reply, simply turning her gaze forward to the blue-white spire of frozen flames off in the distance.

Waver, for his part, tried to keep his gaze on the ground beneath. The effort of controlling Volumen Hydrargyrum wasn't nearly enough to distract him from the oceanic nothingness staring down on the world from on high...

But really, he'd take whatever he could get.

It took nearly a minute to make the gap the The Director had set before them, and by then they were already nearly at the valley floor. Once they had caught up, the journey continued in silence until they reached it, at which point Utnapishtim came to an abrupt halt, skidding slightly, and turned on his heel, coming to a stop at the same moment he faced them. Whatever irritation he had felt was gone from his face.

"Our final destination is yonder spire of broken flame."

Then, suddenly, Waver felt a sense of connection, and the quality of the energy in the air began to change, becoming more hostile and familiar. At the same moment, the Director looked sharply up at the hole in the air, towards a pinpoint of red light that showed the connection to the Road.

"The eye of the storm's breaking just reached us. Gaia is pouring through that hole. We _must_ begin moving."

But whatever the Director meant by that, he didn't mean "with haste". They set off at a steady pace, but only something that would have had the most horrendously out-of-shape Lord breathing fast. It was uneventful. Though...

The frozen silhouettes had been strange seen from afar. Here, walking past them as they twitched and shuddered through their last moments of existence... it was unsettling.

 _Like Pompeii,_ Waver thought, _but animate_.

Some were crouched on the ground, huddling, but most were frozen through an instant of running. And the more he saw, the more Waver realized that the vast majority were running _from_ the city, and if he had to guess, probably from the Tower that so dominated the scene.

As they crossed into the outskirts of the city, Waver saw that what had looked like grey stone from on high was actually something else entirely. It was a strange, flowing pattern without repeats. A sharp and qausicrystaline design that he had seen once, five years ago, in Lorelei Barthomeloi's office.

Curious in spite of himself, he began, "Vice Director, do you know anything about..." He gestured at the ground.

Silence. Waver glanced back. The Director was gone.

When he looked back up front, so was Lorelei.

The shadows eating the world began to move smoothly, flowing across the ground towards Waver, then jerked to a halt once more. In the same moment, The Director and Lorelei reappeared, the former calm, the latter in the process of whirling around.

"Well," Utnapishtim's voice was grim, "That is... not good. At all. Lord El-Melloi, if you would? We need to leave this place only slightly less than we need to reach our objective."

So, once again, Waver held out his hands, and made Volumen Hydrargyrum come to life. And then, they were off, moving at upwards of eighty kilometres per hour.

At this rate he would be exhausted in under an hour, but it would take considerably less time to reach the tower in the distance.

At least, that was what he was thinking when they shot into a large plaza still at least a kilometre away from the tower, and the something caused the _Volumen_ to lose all cohesion, throwing them at the ground with enough force to peel skin from any ordinary person's bones.

None of them were ordinary, however. Waver Reinforced himself, and tumbled a good distance, but ultimately accumulated only mild bruising. Shakily, he got to his feet, head swimming, and spat dust out of his mouth -

And he saw her. Frozen. Running. Terror carved into every feature, still fresh after thousands upon thousands of years, tears travelling down her face - one caught forever in the air behind her.

Almost instinctively, Waver reached out-

"No! Don't!" The Director shouted, a current of actual panic in his voice-

-and his finger brushed against the tear.

And suddenly, it was sunset,

the damage in the world was gone,

and the city was no longer destroyed.

Waver took an involuntary breath,

and it _burned_ with a dozen subtly alien ideas.

A Tower of weird, blue flame flowed up from the ground, flowing into a million qausicrystaline forms. It took only a moment of view to understand what it was, for it was a concept and shaped like itself.

A road to the end of the sky.

And as Waver's gaze traced it's outlines, as he saw into the impossible place that that pathway attained, something else drew his attention.

It was at the edge of night, in the last minutes of sunset.

_And every star in the sky burned gold._

(Round 1. Clock start. Black wants to move first.)

 

 

 

* * *

A Threat determined: a response decided,  
Will against will, world and world collided,  
a query sent, and in long moments replied:  
" _It is without cost. We will not be defied!_ "

And so a message sent, that message decried,  
awaken white dog! For your time is nigh!  
and with bestial howl to the heavens denied,  
the fragment nears where the world winds.

* * *

 

  


  


##  **Site IV  
Fantasia**

  


When you put five of the world's most combat-effective magi in a confined radius, even something as ridiculous as dozens of Monstrous Beasts didn't make for much of a threat. The procedure was simple: cut them off from the support of Gaia, wait for their biology to fail. Maybe speed the process up a bit. What it amounted to was the further obliteration of the ruins in the valley, and dead bodies.

After about twenty minutes of this, Gaia seemed to get the message, and the flow of Monstrous Beasts stemmed.

But then there was a sound. It was in two tones that wove together and alternately amplified and cancelled each other out. It began nearly as deep as whalesong, then dropped lower, pitching beneath the limits of human hearing, and shaking the ground.

An area of the battlefield covered with perceptual static, the chaos invoked by thousands of curses being concentrated in one space tensed, and then flexed, the static blasting outwards and soaking into the ground. At the epicentre of the burst, the Red stood, staring off into the distance.

Placing his right index and middle fingers to the same ear, he cast a cantrip he had used so often that he no longer even had to think of it consciously. "Does anyone know what that came from?"

There was a chorus of negatives, until, at last, the Black replied, "Dragon. Thirteen o'clock, relative tower."

Mathais' eyes widened, and he spun around, already beginning to shout out an order.

And then the Indus Valley lit up with such ferocity that they may as well have been standing on the surface of a star.

Mathais didn't think because he lacked the time to. He sunk his mind into the thousands of warped structures open to him, and stepped outside of conceptual space. The shockwave from the blast crossed his position a moment later, but the damage and effects from it couldn't touch him - there was no real bridge between his body and the wave of devastation that had just shot past.

And then, he stepped back in.

His vision recovered quickly - another fringe benefit of his lineage - and what he saw...

Was a Phantasmal Beast. Not Divine. Its body was still made of base matter.

But in a way, that was worse. Oh, certainly, a Divine Beast would have been a more terrible foe, but at least it would have held within its depths the very unreality that defined the class.

This?

This was real, even if only just.

The dragon, ten metres tall and thrice that in length stared at him, its two mouths shut, but the fangs bared. The tower which it had tried to destroy was lit with thousands of blood-red Proto-Akkadian runes.

And then Mathais' ability to make sense of the scene was shattered, as images and ideas were imposed on his mind.

Loosening tension - a glacier calving - a fault giving way - leaves of a venus flytrap snapping shut - water boiling explosively - climax - muscles torn apart in a single snap - hunger satiated. Finally his mind found the nature of the concept that the dragon was all but screaming at him: **RELEASE.**

That chain of thematically-linked concepts broke, and was followed by the tower, seen from the eye of the dragon, but strangely. The structure itself was barely more than a suggestion, but the ward that the Director had left behind was rendered with supernatural clarity, far more acutely than the human eye could perceive.

Finally, it transmitted one last idea. Charred bodies. Four of them, and Mathais' himself standing before them, expression empty, red light of the shield flooding in behind him.

The message was utterly clear: _Re_ _lease_ _the ward - or I will destroy them all._

Even if he could have done so, Mathais would have given it his refusal in the clearest terms imaginable -

\- but it turned out he had no need of it. Blue-green light flared from within the tower, and then, impossibly, the Phantasmal Beast was crumbled against one of the valley's walls, at least one of its wings broken. Aikaterina Edelfelt occupied roughly the same place its head had been, one fist swathed in hermetic fire. But she wasn't unscathed. Slowly, bonelessly, she began to fall to the earth as the fires of Mercury guttered out.

Mathais didn't move. He was fast, but he was too distant - he'd never be able to reach her in time. ' _C'mon, Avesta..._ '

His unvoiced plea was answered a moment later, as one of the walls of the Tower exploded outwards, and the Viridian caught Aikaterina in her arms.

They had both survived.

Letting out a breath, and turning away, Mathais placed his fingers at the base of his ear again.

"Magnus."

There was a moment of silence, then, as if the man was standing right next to him, he heard his voice. "Ja?"

"Sever that thing from Gaia and then give me the circle for containment. _I'm going to fucking_ _ **break**_ _it._ "

"Red, are you human?" There was actual concern in the Unifying Grey's voice.

 _I must be pretty far gone,_ Mathais realized. But he replied, "You already know the answer to that. And really Magnus, from you?"

"Ha! True enough. Very well. I'll tell you when."

Mathais didn't reply. He didn't think. His mind had gone strangely silent. His world had narrowed to a single goal: Slaying the dragon.

This thing was no Kur or Lotan, no Fafnir or Zmei Gorynych. It wasn't even from a species that was recorded in the myths of humanity. Just a degenerate cousin.

He ran across the ground heading for the form of the empyrean beast, and as he did so, his form shifted in thousands of subtle ways, defocusing, derealizing, slipping into the space occupied by the sorts of stories that fed on the collective nightmares of humanity. As he closed the distance, he remembered.

_"You see, this material is useless for my work. Its twin was **born** Crimson Red Vermilion, you know that? But this one is wasted. A Terminal of Alaya, but too inhuman to access the World. A demon with barely a drop of human blood, but a soul tied too close to humanity to ever be able to walk beyond it. A wastrel. But I heard that your Branch might have use of the thing."_

_An indistinct reply._

_"I don't particularly care; like I said, its nothing more than a drain. Say you give me three favours when I need them, and we'll call it a fair trade."_

_Another._

_"Always a pleasure, Edelfelt. I'll have it sent presently."_

_Darius Ziel turned around, and looked at the thing standing a few feet away from him. "You've finally done something useful for us," he said, offhand, not really caring if it understood. "The Director of the Enforcer Corps owes the Societas Thule some favours, now."_

_It smiled, but didn't smile - the expression was something it only understood as a series of muscular contortions. The motions were nothing to it._

_"I'm glad," it said, and kept on not-smiling, as Darius moved past it and out the door, no doubt to regale his brothers with a narrative of his political acumen only barely related to the truth._

And then he'd left that place, sold out of slavery for being too human for a magus' purposes. But it wasn't until he had arrived and the Enforcer Corps that he had begun to understand even the barest sketch of what that humanity had meant.

Even that had only been because Sannalina had taken an interest.

And although he would never admit it to Aikaterina, what with her being an utter bitch, he would _never_ forget what her sister had done for him.

He didn't think that Sannalina would have wanted this.

Using a fragment of another world like that was dangerous beyond expression. Based on how she had fallen, her body really hadn't taken it well, so - if only he could -

he would end this. Not least because Aikaterina hadn't been _alone_ in that Tower.

And then the dragon spoke to him in the same impossible dialect of ideas. But, as he fell deeper into the legacy left him by Ziel, and further from his own nature, those isolated morphemes coagulated into structure.

Wounds being inflicted - a leopard making a kill - consumption of flesh - a parasite diving into the lymph nodes of its host: **DO.**

An image of himself: **YOU.**

Many things, now to much blurred to be distinguished: **TRULY**

And bleeding into words: **Believe that?**

**Do you _really_ believe those things? Do you really believe you are human? You are far more like us. Alaya's grip on you is tight, but you do not have to participate in this madness. You are enough of us to have that much of a choice.**

"And why on earth would I help you destroy the world?"

 **Is that what the God on yonder construct told you?** _ **Lies**_ **. I was not sent here to destroy the World. I was sent here to** _ **save**_ **it. And all I ask is that you help me -** an image of a plague rotting the life from the world **\- help me -** of continents burning **-** _ **HELP ME**_ **-** the oceans bitter with poison, rotting in silence **\- THAT THE WORLD WILL NOT -** Earth, barren and brown, rotating through the void, dead now, and evermore.

And it was telling the truth, Mathais realized, or at least, it believed that Gaia thought that whatever they had done would end the world.

He drew to a halt, standing before the beast. Distantly, he heard a familiar voice say words that he was beyond understanding - Magnus, though - and that only meant one thing.

The dragon regarded him, with all its regal splendour, calm despite what had just been done to it; the wounds on its body slowly decomposing into ash as Gaia tore them from the history she acknowledged against Alaya's will.

" _You're sincere_ ," Mathais said without speaking, going deeper, deeper into the depth of his blood. " _Convincing._ " He took a step forward. " _You're right, when it comes down to it. I'm not really a human. Just a monster bearing the label. And like you, I don't want anything to end. I'm not ready for the world to die, since I'd go with it._ " He stopped right in front of the Phantasmal Beast.

" _But you see, you did one thing wrong._ "

" _You tried to destroy something that I loved. And so all of this doesn't matter. You say the world's going to die?_ "

_**\- No.** _

" _You say that everything's going to end!?_ "

**This is not worth two lives!**

" _Then let it. If your survival is the price of the world, then its a price I'll never pay._ "

_**Alayan!** _

" _Yes._ _ **Human**_ _. Label or no, I call myself that. Just how did you confuse me for something else?_ "

**May you lose _everything_.**

"And you the same."

Mathais spread his arms wide, embraced the sky.

And then there was a moment of unity, as every disjointed curse and discordant concept malingering in his blood sang out and built a beautiful, soul-shattering chord.

Earlier, when the Director and his group had used their mystery, it had felt as if he had stood on the surface of the sun.

Now, he was become it.

The world grew dark.

The dragon screamed.

Blackness. Flashes of clarity showing unspeakable shapes and the world outlined in furious light as Gaia fought off being consumed.

Then, slowly, starting at his now _thoroughly_ human body, starlight returned, in an ever growing circle, until the curses were let from existence, shattered range nearly hundred metres wide.

Of the dragon, nothing remained.

Mathais stood there for a few moments, looking at the spot where, moments ago, there had been a phantasmal beast. Numbly, exhausted, he muttered, "And another bit of wonder fades from the world," and slumped forward, then collapsed to his knees, utterly spent. "Gods and fire, I hope that's the last of it."

But of course, it wasn't.

  


  


  


##  **A Tear in the Air  
as A Tear in the World**

  


There was a tower of blue flame, leaning slightly on its side. The sun sung low in the horizon, setting flame to the clouds, painting the city in a thousand variegated shades of gold. Buildings made according to some dead paleoarchitectural principle radiated out, surrounding the spire of unnatural flame, and light accorded the same colour as the tower bled from the quasicrystal patterns inset on the street.

Though the materials were unfamiliar, though the city was silent, in scope and breadth it was the easy equal of anything that was in the modern world. And certainly not the cousin of whatever pale remnants had been on the other side of the Road, or the destroyed city within Etu.

In the Holy Grail War, he had caught some glimpse of what had been lost when the Age of the Gods had come to a close, but until now, he had had _no idea_ of the scale of that lost magnificence, from the age when the world was most hostile to humanity.

Waver Velvet stared at the city with something equating awe.

" _Awe. Yes. That is the original meaning of the Word. She died in what is to come._ "

The voice came from behind him, and Waver slowly turned around to see... nothing.

Behind him, there was no ground, no sky. The city did not continue into the mountains, as it's ruins had.

Only one thing hadn't vanished: The aperture of The Road. It was just _barely_ on the right side of the line the separated the world from the void - a true void. A place without up, or down, left or right, front or back, beginning... or end.

Waver stumbled backwards from the edge of the world, and collided with something soft. He spun on his feet, and saw - 

A girl who couldn't have been much older than Irene. Her eyes were dark, almost black, skin coloration typical to this area of the world, heigh above average. If it weren't for the fact that she was _here_ she could have been almost anyone.

But he recognized her. She had been the one running away from the shattered remnants of the tower. He had touched her one of her tears...

"What's wrong? You look like you've seen something terrible, Mage." That last: said like a name.

"That language..." Waver said, momentarily stunned. It hadn't been English, but he had understood it perfectly.

Her face recorded confusion, and not a little bit of pain.

"That... _ow_. What was that?"

His words had hurt her? Then...

Waver shook his head, and gestured at his mouth, then made a cutting motion with his hand.

"... I don't get it," she replied, then grabbed his hand, "I know someone who might though. You understand me, so follow."

The the contrary, Waver didn't understand anything. How the hell had touching a tear brought him... What? Into the past? That wasn't right. This entire world was incomplete right behind his point of entry, and even though this was a massive city by the standards of the _modern_ world, he had only seen one person.

He doubted that it was a coincidence the she had also been to only true person he had seen on the other side.

So, perhaps... not the past, but a more intact remnant of the city they had been exploring. If that was the case, though, why was someone alive? Why only one?

There was nobody else here. Nobody at all.

It hit him then, just how utterly out of his depth he was.

This entire place was several steps beyond anything he had experienced before. There was definitely magecraft involved in it's building, but he couldn't see _any_ of the various flavours of mana, or even prana at work. It was like his Sixth sense had chosen that moment to go completely and utterly blind. And then there was that sense of _otherness_ in the air - something he hadn't felt since last being in Ionioi Hetairoi.

But it wasn't _quite_ the same.

 _Here_ had the feel of an innate bounded field, but... diffuse. pervasive. unconstrained.

An alien perspective, but with none of the strain.

"You picked a terrible day, you know," The girl said in that strange, _strange_ language, pulling him towards the blue-white spire, "Well, I mean, you probably had no idea that whatever happened to you was going to. Charting new domains, exploring the nine worlds and all of that - you look nothing like how you were when I last saw you, you know that? - but still; you had to know that today was the day when the tower was going to be completed, right?"

The ...tower?

"- I guess it was good in a way. I mean, now you're going to get to see the most important moment in out history right up close and personal! At least, I think that's good. Do you?"

But Waver wasn't paying attention any more. Tower. A _tower_. Waver looked to the burning pillar of flame, saw it from that perspective... And suddenly **everything** made perfect sense.

The crumbling building, the destroyed city, the blue inferno of frozen flame at it's centre, shattered.

And what had the Director said, so quietly that nobody had been supposed to hear?

' _Awaken, Road to..._ '

But now, in here, in this world that was Earth but not Gaia, was the World but not Alaya, Waver thought he understood what had really been said underneath the English all along.

" **Awaken, Road. to.** _ **Babel**_ **.** "

Babel. The Tower.

The Tower of Babel.

"Gods and fire," Waver murmured, and the girl flinched. It couldn't be. It _couldn't_ be.

But a single word could confirm it.

With a shaking hand, Waver Velvet pointed to the the pillar of flame, a spoke that word.

"Babel?"

And glancing back at him with a pained smile, the girl that had been pulling him toward it nodded.

  


  


##  **The Dead City**

  


"Scheiss!" The Director cursed, "That _idiot_."

"What just happened?" Lorelei asked.

"I have _no idea_. We're inside a dead World being digested by a root-be-damned primordial demon. The One Without Completion, no less!"

The Director took a series of deep breaths, then sighed, the tension draining from his frame.

"Waver Velvet is beyond our help. If he manages to escape this place, it will have to be on his own merits. Shite, what the hell tempted him to touch one of their silhouettes -"

"Silhouettes?" Lorelei said, "I don't see any silhouettes. I see frozen people."

"And I'm glad I _don't_ ," Utnapishtim said, his expression unreadable, but his tone so absolutely _certain_ that it was all Lorelei could do to stop herself from asking just what this place _was_ to him.

A susurrus of not quite whispers and not quite silence travelled past them like a wave, and everything grew the barest tint darker.

It was a bad sign, but Lorelei suspected that the thing that _really_ mattered was where that phenomena was heading for - the broken tower itself.

"We must run." The Director said, and with those words, bolted towards the broken pillar of flame at inhuman speed. Lorelei followed, matching it easily.

But no matter how quickly they moved, the couldn't seem to outpace the eldritch noumenon - at first they gained ground, but as the neared the tower, it gained speed exponentially, at first slowly outpacing them, and then, too fast to comprehend, it slammed into the tower, and rocked world slightly. Sending slabs of stone raining down from the crumbling buildings that now surrounded them. Lorelei had to use timed gusts to push herself out of the path of myriad pieces of falling debris. The Directory simply continued through them, his body being destroyed several times. Each time it was, shards of light bent through the air and somehow _refracted_ him back into existence, moving, if anything, _faster_.

When they reached the tower seconds later, as far as their senses - natural and supernal - could tell, absolutely nothing happened to it. But then, in a place like this, neither of them would ever trust such fragile things as senses.

Unwinded by the run or the peril they had both just faced, they ascended a stairway, and came to a stop before a set of two gates made of not fire, but marble and obsidian. Glyphs in a script that Lorelei recognized as similar to that used by the dead civilisation of the Indus Valley adorned the door, six in total. If they had any meaning, though, it wasn't held in their form. Unlike the Unified Language which would have been spoken in this era, the symbols appeared to be just another of the many written languages of the world.

Utnapishtim held his timepiece up, and then let go. It remained in the air, and at last, it ticked back, one last time. Midnight returned, and then, the watch's component parts dissociated themselves, the face flipping until it was parallel to the ground while the hands remained pointed straight up, at the nadir of time.

The Director held his hand out, over the jagged pieces of frozen-sunset-caught-in-stained-glass, and hesitated.

"What is it?" Lorelei asked.

"Something I've never wanted to do. A mind that I never wanted to understand. And now -"

And he reached out, grasped the fragmentary sunset, and carefully let it cut into the pad of his thumb.

" _Theopsema - '_ I am Iadabalaoth. _'_ " The last three words were spoken in the Original Language, and the moment they left his lips, the Director released the fragment, which fell back into the watch.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then, one by one, the paired symbols of Indus Script began to vanish.

"Theopsema," Lorelei said, "Divine lies?"

"That door was only meant to open for two. I _was_ one of them, but no longer."

"And Iadabalaoth was the other? That name is familiar. Yahweh as seen by the Gnostics?"

"Not... quite. The narrative is similar though."

And then there was no time left for words, as silently, the doors of frozen flame opened to reveal -

  


  


  


  


##  **The City of █████**

  


As they came to it, Waver realised that the Tower was complete.

 _But the tower_ always _falls before its finished_ , Waver thought.

" _Yes. And can not_ _ **hope**_ _to stop it."_ For the second time, the voice that only Waver could seem to hear spoke. _"Instead, watch. And_ _ **learn**_ _. It was something you were never meant to see, Waver Velvet - and that might make all the difference._ "

And then, the sunset _shattered_ , gaining mass, and meaning, and definition, and lines of absolute black were drawn between fragments like stained glass.

" _It begins,_ " the voice said.

Then, a sound - no. A voice. But the language was completely alien, and absolutely incomprehensible - and then a glowing, vaguely male body made completely out of light flew out of a sidestreet, and hit the ground with not a thud, but a ripple.

The spirit, or whatever it was laid there, blinking dazedly then began to sit up, rubbing at its face, thought Waver couldn't see any damage to it. Odd. At the same moment, a young man with blond hair and red eyes walked out of the alleyway, looking absolutely _furious_.

The spirit-person said something again, then glanced over to Waver and Leika.

The Gilgamesh lookalike's eyes widened slightly, and he turned his gaze to them.

"What brings you here?" He asked.

Waver opened his mouth, then closed it, remembering the pain that his words had seemed to cause.

"Well, I was just working on this little project of mine, and then Mage just... appeared. Out of nowhere. Like, _bam_ , and then he was there, and when he talks, it hurts, and... Have you ever seen anything like that, Artis?"

 _Artis_. She said it like a name, but like every other word she had used, it was a purified and refined concept, perfect, perfect, _perfect_ in its execution, the root word for all creation by human means.

And Artis replied: "...I have. Can even work through it. Let me talk to him. Alone."

Without so much as a by-your-leave, the Gilgamesh lookalike grabbed Waver by the arm and dragged him into one of the building of the city, down a hallway, and into a secluded room. He made a slashing motion with his hand, and the entry vanished with such abrupt suddenness that Waver couldn't even see the transition, leaving them in a sealed space whose walls faintly glowed.

"Who are you?" He demanded. When Waver made no motion to answer, he sighed, and then in a different language, which, while as understandable as the other felt even less natural, he said, "I can speak the the Tongue of Heaven. Your words can't hurt me. So - answer the question."

"Waver Velvet," Waver said. "I'm not quite sure how I've arrived here."

"I don't care. If you saw the Great God, would you tell him of Enki's presence?"

"Given that you look about ready to kill me if I say yes? Of course not." Left unsaid was, ' _But I have no idea what you're talking about you lunatic._ '

Artis mouthed ' _kill_ ', and looked faintly nauseated. "What a disgusting concept," he said, but then nodded. "Fine. I'll let her take you to Babel. You're just as broken as the rest of us anyway."

Artis opened his arms as if embracing the air, and a hallway directly out of the building opened along that path. Then he marched out at a speed that was just _rude_.

Waver snorted at the absurd thought. He really had been spending too much time with the clocktower if - his chain of thought came to an abrupt halt, as he beheld the scene outside.

It wasn't what he expected. Artis had thrown his arms around the shoulders of the girl in an awkward hug. As Waver closed the gap, he heard the tail end of whatever Artis had been saying. "...that I am so, _so_ sorry."

And Waver realized: _He knows._

Before she had any chance to respond, Artis had turned in another direction entirely, and had begun sprinting away. "Enki!" He shouted, then added, "Prometei!"

The spirit made of light stood, and _surged_ after Artis. If Prometei referred to anyone, then it was one of the many thousands of people that, should have been here, but here missing from his perception.

"What in Gaea's name..."

That drew Waver's attention back to the girl.

She was looking after the retreating figure of Artis, with as confused an expression as he'd ever seen.

Slowly, her eyes slid back to Waver.

"You could talk to him?"

Waver nodded.

"Why?"

Unable to say anything about what had happened, Waver could only shrug.

"Even you don't know? Or, you can't say..."

Waver shrugged again. The girl nodded.

"Come on. We have to get the the tower - to the Original One - before it starts."

And that raised two questions that Waver desperately wanted to ask, but didn't have the words for. So mutely, as his companion turned, and began a brisk pace towards the tower, all he could do was follow.

  


  


 

  


* * *

Her claws score herself, self healing in time,  
a pain rarely felt, and so deemed sublime,  
wending and weaving, sourcing through air,  
she screams. (In hope, or despair?)

"Will you not stop?" She asks that which was lost - and "No!" it replies, "No matter the cost!" Very well, acquiescence, peace denied

**MURDER THE PRIMATES, LET THEM DIE!**

* * *

 

  


  


##  **Site IV  
Archetypes**

  


There was a sound that wasn't a sound, that wasn't something that could be rationalised as sensory input, that simply, in all of its terrible magnificence and by Gaia's will _was_.

In its passing, it left jagged cracks against the night sky, that the world smoothed over and repaired as they were formed. A pale light began to glimmer at the edges of the valley, and slowly, _slowly_ the air _pulsed_ and _shuddered._

The stars in the sky swum, as if through a prism of oil, as something grew, and ebbed, sending waves of unease laced with a frisson of atavistic terror out before it.

Whatever was approaching wasn't a beast, or a spirit, or anything that could be understood as an _enextension_ of Gaia, so much as a _singularity of it_. A point in which the One stood for the All, and where the All was the One.

The first thing any of the Wizard Marshalls saw was a head, bobbing over the crest of the hill. It belonged to what looked like a young girl, of perhaps fourteen years of age. Her hair was black but had threads of blond woven in with it. Her eyes were not red or crimson so much as ruby, gemlike in their completely alien perfection.

Her head dipped back beneath the horizon.

Then, soulless terror incarnate.

It could not be adequately described. Were the attempt made, you might imagine a wolf, but not a wolf - just something viewed through the lens of a canine, just as humans see the world through a lens of their humanity.

Its true form was indeterminate, but perfectly evolved and constantly breaking the limits of that perfection, seething forward and refining itself into new and different shapes. It lived, but lived beyond the boundaries of what humanity could understand as life.

It was white. It was the size of a five story building. And on what could vaguely be thought of as its head, a princess rode.

It bound over the horizon, and landed before the Wizard Marshalls, coming to a perfect halt, its body _rippling_ to cancel the excess momentum.

Then, five steps.

It took the living being five steps, to stand before the broken tower. Then, it stopped, and moved back into a relaxed position. Nimbly, the girl that had ridden on its head leapt off, and alighted upon the Earth with foreign grace.

She hummed, inspecting the frozen, unmoving, _unbreathing_ forms of the Wizard Marshalls. "This is no good." She glanced back at the living being behind her, and said, "Heel!"

Something within it stopped. The form settled, shifted slightly. And suddenly, the only humans in this exchange were capable of thought again.

"Better," she said, the turned her attention to the four figures on the ground. Without inflection, she continued, "You woke us up."

Magnus, who had recovered the most quickly, swallowed and said, "That was not our intent."

"We do not care, chattel. Speak again, if you value nothing."

When silence prevailed, the girl nodded as if something had been confirmed.

"What are you?"

"Now see," Mathais began, "That is a dreadfully complicated -"

And that was about as far as he got, before his left arm simply vanished.

"Did we say that you had leave to answer that question?" She asked, the untone of her voice preserved, her features blank.

To his credit, Mathais did not shout out in pain, but simply fell to one knee, right hand frantically clenching at where his arm had once been.

"Now... You are certainly not scholars. You reacted improperly. You do not wear the cloth, so you are not representatives of the Church of Man. You are not the typical ill-bred form of your species... And so, I am left with a conundrum. If you were Divine Spirits, Gaia simply would have unmade you. But you are not alien enough to be Gods. Nor is the remainder of Alaya among you. Very well. You, with one arm. You are very eager to speak, therefore tell me: what are you?"

"Mathais," the Red managed to get out, followed by, "Duchesne. Terminal of Alaya. Transparent Crimson Absolute. Wizard Marshall."

"And which of those properties do you share with those others, hm?"

"Wizard Marshall."

"Hmmm..." She considered that - and then stiffened, glancing up at something only she could see.

"Svelten! Strout!" Two blurs materialized on the air, and in the same moment, seven figures, both men and women, simply _appeared_ , without any indication as to how they had got there.

Avesta, feeling an echo of the absolute antipathy that Gaia held for them, realised what the Spirits actually were - and felt sick. _Counter Guardians._

Altrouge gestured at the seven, who had made no move. "Deal with these... things until I have satisfied myself. Then I shall join you."

"My lady!" They said, and then, something happened so quickly that none of the Wizard Marshalls could perceive it, and there was a scar in the earth where the White and Black Knights had stood, followed by the clash of a tremendous battle being joined in the distance.

"Alaya... against me?" Her gaze flashed to the Wizards Marshalls, "What have you _done_?"

For the very first time, an actual emotion leaked into the Princess' voice.

"... one of you, speak!" She demanded, sounding faintly exasperated.

"We have no idea," Avesta said, "Only that it was necessary to prevent the end of the world.

"Then you were lied to, and are of no more use." The Apostle Ancestor turned away, then paused, and glanced back.

"Or perhaps... Hm." She smiled. "You can be of service after all. We would ask you to thank Us for the honour, but doubtless you are too bound by your egos to view it as such. Very well - Our generosity extends to all, grateful or not."

She began to walk away, and paused at the flank of the living being. "Exercise your restraint," she commanded to it, and then, Altrouge Brunestud, the Ninth Apostle Ancestor, vanished in a moment of speed so intense that it should have shattered the earth beneath her feet, though it left no trace. At the same moment Primate Murder, the First, rose and began to slowly, slowly advance on the Wizard Marshalls.

"Anyone have a plan?" Avesta asked.

"Run." It was Magnus who replied. "You, Aikaterina, and Mathais, Black - must leave. And I must stay."

Primate Murder took another step forward, if you could call the way of its motion walking at all.

"You can't fight _that_ ," Avesta said, " _None_ of us can!"

Another motion forward.

"But I can slow it down. Maybe. The longer we keep it from reaching Barthomeloi and the Director, the better _their_ chances. We are all expendable." Dragomirov looked up at the World Beast, felt the edges of the terror that its very image placed in his mind, and with a single incision, Severed the entirety of it. And then there was no fear. "But I will go first."

Avesta gave him a look he couldn't understand the reason for. She pitied him - was sorry for him, was grateful to him, wanted to say something to stop what was going to come.

But why?

This made sense.

There was nothing to regret.

Without acting on her feelings, his comrade turned and ran over to Mathais, and slung his remaining arm over her shoulder. The Black had already gone. Aikaterina was regarded him steadily. Then, she passed judgement. "You must have come from a very, very old line. Is there anything you want me to take care of?"

"If you survive? It would settle the last of my concerns if someone you felt competent beyond what was to be expected of them was placed in charge of my department. If possible."

Aikaterina nodded. "I will see to it." Then, she was gone. Absently, Magnus noticed that Avesta had left him as well.

Primate Murder had turned its attention to the valley walls, presumably towards where the others had fled.

 _No good,_ Magnus thought, and in the same moment, pulled a ballistic knife out of his coat, aimed it in the general direction of Primate Murder, and fired.

Despite the fact that blade was a conceptual weapon of the first order, a thing capable of killing hundreds of men in the piercing of even a single one's flesh, it did absolutely nothing beyond getting the First Ancestor's attention.

That was all it was supposed to do. Magnus stood, and watched the archpredator of humanity near him, and felt... disinterested. A bit curious, as well, but not for it.

Casually, with a gesture that almost bled boredom, it raised one of its limbs and swept its articulated claws down, cutting the air, cutting the world.

 _And so this is how I am going to die,_ thought the Unifying Grey. And then, absurdly, he smiled. _How fitting!_

He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe.

The claws swung down slowly - so achingly slowly - and yet the idea of getting out of the way never once crossed his mind.

For this was Primate Murder, and it held the absolute authority to kill all humans.

But of course, no Incarnation is ever _quite_ human - and with a decisive cut, Magnus left the last of his humanity behind.

Then, he held out his hand, and prepared to cast a madness against the world - a Mystery that would force his perspective on the universe, destroy his soul, and hopefully wound the First Ancestor enough to buy a minute.

 _I am the..._ He began, within his mind -

And upon the very last moment, a golden light intervened.

"Your authority," said a deep, resonant voice, "has been rejected."

And then, Magnus' sixth sense _screamed_ : Nature - **SWORD**

  


  


##  **The Dead City**  
 **Continued**

  


\- nothing. The shattered tower of blue flames was completely empty.

"No," Utnapishtim breathed, "No, damn the Gods, _no_!"

"Something's missing," Lorelei concluded.

"Some _thing_ well, yes, I suppose that's one way to put it. The frozen corpse of an alien God with conceptual affini to match the threat of a bloody Ultimate One should have been right _here_."

"... and you considered this -" Lorelei gestured around indicating the entire remnant of the city - " _safe_?"

"What you you have done, then, Barthomeloi?" Utnapishtim shot back, with lightning speed. "I ended the city outside. I _made_ those ruins. But this? This place? This great mausoleum for a world that never was!? That was the doing of that _thing_. And _this_ is what it means to be a guardian of the scales. When I realized that Iadabalaoth did not die in the fall of Babel, when I realized that in Etu where truth itself is incomplete, it slept, I had to weigh the risk of taking it off the Earth against what would be lost if it were ever _permitted_ the _chance_ to reawaken and continue.

"We. do not. protect. the Earth. We do not measure the weight of the world. We do not measure the weight of _any_ world. Or even _all_ of them! We do not protect something so insignificant as the _balance_! We are the guardians of the _scales_ , Barthomeloi! The name has meaning!" The last sentence was all but snarled. And then quietly, "I saw my home _burned_ for that name." His voice rose again, but as it did, his shoulders slumped, his entire posture grew weary, and for the first time, the man standing before her really _looked_ as ancient as the name he claimed. "What would you have done in my place?"

And then there was silence.

"Nothing different? Of course."

"The primary objective of this mission is a failure. There's only one thing left." Utnapishtim said, turning, and walking into the centre of the room. "Something to make this trip worth the effort." He stopped, and with a single motion of his hands, created an ebony cane with a suspiciously large diamond on top. _Exactly_ like the one he had destroyed earlier. And was done so simply that it was absolutely obvious that it had cost him nothing. After testing it's balance, he placed it on the floor, and stepped back, speaking all the while.

"This world is not aware of impossibility, nor the form of the concept that it is an undername of. At the very least, we can create something... to contain the calamity that will occur in Fuyuki."

Lorelei followed, but in her mind was a suspicious thought. ' _Your home, burned, Director? And where was that, I wonder? It certainly was_ _ **not**_ _Sumer._ '

  


  


##  **Site IV  
Inciting Incident**

  


The clash of battle between the Dead Apostles, the Counter Guardians, and the beasts of Gaia rung out from just over the horizon, but for all the effect that it had on the tableau before him, it may as well have been silent.

One arm.

 _One. arm_.

A man, dressed in low-grade mystic armaments stood just in front of Magnus, one hand raised above his head, fingers interlocked with the serrated blade-claws of Primate Murder. The living being's form bulged, and twitched with effort, but the only thing that gave way was the ground, which cracked under the man's feet.

"You, behind me." The man spoke. Magnus stiffened.

"Retreat. This is not a battle that any mortal being will be able to withstand."

There was a moment of silence, as Magnus processed the meaning of those words, then he nodded, performed a minor cantrip, and spoke.

"Wizard Marshalls. Alaya has sent an eighth Counter Guardian. I'm not sure why, but it... No, _he_ is self-aware, and has suggested a retreat."

The silence of incomprehension held on the line for a moment, before, "I'm with Mathais and Avesta," Aikaterina's voice, "Black is elsewhere. Falling back."

Primate Murder let loose another one of those terrible, comprehension-shattering screams, but Magnus was beyond his humanity now. It was completely meaningless to him.

"I don't know who you are, Counter Guardian, but you have my thanks."

The Counter Guardian looked at him, expression wry. "I'm not doing this for you. Go."

Magnus nodded, and with a blur, vanished.

And then, it was only the Counter Guardian named Emiya Shirou, and one of the Archetypes of Earth.

Emiya smiled.

_It was about damn time._

"Now, Gaia... Why don't I show you how to _murder a world_?" Emiya smiled and the expression held entirely too many teeth. "It begins like this: _I am the bone of my sword!_ "

And with those words alone, Emiya and Primate Murder fell into an alien realm.

  


  


##  **The Great God**

  


As they came closer to the Tower, Waver saw that it wasn't made of flame at all. Instead, it was something else entirely, something, Waver was sure, that was as completely alien to the world as the material of Ea itself. The substance, at once crystalline and flowing sourced up from the ground, and into the heavens, tiny currents of turbulence.

The fragments of it on the other side hadn't looked like anything other than cyan fire. Another question, another piece of the puzzle, and not nearly enough.

When they reached the wall, the girl didn't even stop. She just walked through, and Waver felt their hands part as he came to a halt before the Tower of Babel.

Not because he was afraid that the substance would burn him - he felt no heat, and the girl wouldn't have gone into the wall without hesitation if there was even a chance.

But because, if he went inside, there was no turning back.

He had seen what had become of this place, and whatever was in the tower was very likely knowledge akin to God.

Fire, in other words.

Perhaps useful. Certainly able to burn the world.

But, as much as humans feared the unknown, and were in awe of it, the generations the beheld ignorance and saw it as _good_ had burned away a century ago, and among Magi, had never been at all.

Fear was not _ever_ enough. Terror was only an excuse.

And so _what_ if the knowledge inside the Tower of Babel was akin to the Gods? Hadn't humanity decided to _use_ fire? Wasn't to be a magus to walk with Death?

Waver Velvet stepped forth, through a wall of gentle motion, and initially felt resistance, as the shards of alien substance scoured at his spirit - but running Prana through his circuits dispelled the phenomena, and a moment later, he stood on the other side - and if what he was seeing was correct, apparently several hundred metres up from where he had stood seconds ago, on an invisible surface that the blue flames poured against and around.

The girl who had brought him here stood before an arch that beheld the void that the Road was embedded in, just finishing a conversation, like as not about his linguistic difficulties with someone couldn't see. A moment later, she turned to look at him, smiling.

"█████ said can be fixed! Isn't that wonderful?"

Waver smiled, since it wasn't as if he could actually say anything without causing his companion pain.

Then, another voice spoke. " _Leika_ ," was what Waver heard. Like everything else that had been said, Waver understood it, though it was not English. Unlike everything else, this word had no analogue in the tongue of Albion. What it meant was so ridiculously broad that he was fairly certain that there never _could_ be an English word fit to carry the concept. It was... almost simplistic. Naive, even.

It was, in short, a word that meant every property of every fluid _simultaneously_. Electrons flowing, white-water rapids, the spinning vortex of a tornado and the toroidal vortice of a Bose-Einstein condensate - mana surging, od circulating, the weak interactions between the latter and blood - and more. So, so much more. There were dozens of inherent contradictions in the word, and yet... it worked. Impossibly, it worked. It should have destroyed itself, but... it worked. _How?_

As Waver had processed all of this, the girl - _Leika_ , he realized - had left.

That other voice spoke again. "You are not Mage."

Waver couldn't quite tell where, precisely, the voice had come from. But based on where Leika had been standing, he could guess.

"I have no idea who Magos is," Waver admitted, saying the sounds he had heard accompanying Mage, instead of the concept he had understood when he heard them.

"Of course not. You aren't even human."

Then, something separated from the void, and began walking towards him. It was human, nearly like the Director in that Waver couldn't discern any real information about its identity. But it was only _like_ the Director. The Director, Utnapishtim, had actively concealed his identity.

But this wasn't concealment. The figure walking towards Waver wasn't hiding itself from being discerned. It wasn't cloaked at all.

In an instant, Waver understood what his senses couldn't. Who he stood before was without identity - to the point that even its origin had been lost. The only things that remained of this beings identity was it's tile - Original One - it's nature - human - and the meaning of its words.

"I _am_ human." Waver said.

The figure came to a stop with five feet between itself and Waver.

"And what does that last word mean to you, I wonder? For it has great meaning, and should only be used... with the greatest of care."

"Great meaning?" Waver laughed, once at the insinuation. "All we've ever managed are negative definitions. Not Dead Apostles. Not Spirits. Not of Gaia-"

The figure flinched.

"What on Earth are you _talking_ about?" The voice, genderless and nearly uninflected though it was, sounded strained.

The question made no sense to Waver, and so he could not answer it. After nearly a minutes of silence, the Original One arrived at a decision. "You are _not_ human," it judged. "That is certainly not a reason to punish you, but just the same, God: don't claim to be what you can't understand." _God_ was said like a title. "Your Theogony is well made, despite its incomplete language."

"I am _not_ a God," Waver said with quiet emphasis. "My name is Waver Velvet. I'm a magus of the third generation, though I have no Crest. I lead my clan, and follow the ideals of my King. I am a human. We not part of Gaia. We call our world Alaya. There are six billion of us. Magecraft is dying. Wonder is draining out of the world. Perhaps none of that means anything to you, because you're just the ghost of a man in the last phantasm of a destroyed city from the Dawn Era. I don't know where this is, when this is, or how I got here, but -" He was interrupted.

"- You call... your world... _Alaya?_ " The voice sounded choked. The figure spun on it's heels, fast, facing the void, and murmured, "But that would mean -"

But whatever it would have meant was cut off, as the sunset made of stained glass took over even the void where the sky should have been.

"...Iadabalaoth has arrived," the figure said, and turned back around to look at Waver. "If what you've told me is true..."

"I have no idea what's going on," Waver said, "at _all_. But I haven't lied."

It stared at him for a bit longer, then nodded. "Then I can only hope that there is no relationship between your appearance and what is yet to come. Here." It held out its hand, and light from nowhere began to shine out from it.

"What -?"

"- The Language," it explained, "Knowledge. A birthright. I can't ask you what's about to happen. If I knew, then I would lose any ability to shape it. But you aren't from here. So perhaps you aren't bound by that law."

"But you _know._ " Waver said, slowly coming to that realization himself. Something in what he had said had given the fate of the Tower away. "You've put together the pieces."

" _Say no more of it._ " The words, this time, were in perfect English, and after only hearing the language of this place for nearly an hour, it sounded so foreign to Waver's ears that for a moment, he didn't understand what had been said.

"Take the gift," the figure commanded.

Waver reached out, and his hand closed around the sourceless light, which vanished. A moment later, he felt no different, but -

The sound of leather against stone.

The figure without identity turned, and Waver followed its gaze.

' _...What._ '

The figure's appearance was so strange, so incongruous, that for several moments, Waver doubted his sanity.

There was a man, wearing a double breasted business suit and an old, brown scarf. His hair was gelled, and spiked back. His eyes were a warm brown, and despite the hollow cheeks, on appearances alone, the man felt... God, like someone's favourite grandfather. That _exact_ mental image and that _precise_ wording radiated off the thing - and whatever it was, it sure as _hell_ wasn't human - with such horrific force that Waver was incapable of thinking of perceiving it as anything other.

Or, at least, he would have been, had he not been a magus. Od let him resist the effect just enough to realize its wrongness, if barely.

"█████, my friend! You have finished the Tower!" The thing walked over, and hugged the person without identity mechanically, and only after saying the entire line. It paused when it caught a glimpse of Waver.

"I do not know who you are but you should return to the Pleroma at once." Every syllable was completed perfectly before moving onto the next. The message itself was completely uninflected, the spacing between every word exact to the limits of human perception.

"Yes," the Original One said, "Find your way out."

" _Flee from this place._ " Commanded the sourceless voice. " _And save her if you can._ "

"Go." The not-human thing agreed.

Waver took a step back, then another, then turned, and began to run - whatever that thing in the air was, whatever its goal, it had such a poor grasp on humanity that Waver was certain it wouldn't understand what running meant.

As if going back on a script - _No. No 'as if' anywhere in that. It is a script,_ Waver thought - the thing began to speak. "I look forward to offer the Alayakind the same place in the heavens as we all have. Takamagahara will benefit from your-"

And then he was in the walls of flame, and through them.

He came out in the middle of a crowd of people. He wanted to know _why_ but there was no _time_.

Leika was on the other side, looking at him expectantly. "Are you all right, now?"

"Um - yes. Thank you. The -" What had she called it? One, one, _something_ one, "Ultimate - no, Original One fixed the problem. Although I don't have any idea what caused it."

"I'm glad." She said, smiling, "It was horrible. I can't imagine what it must have been like having the Language taken from you."

It wasn't important.

_They had to get out of here._

"Uh - look, the Original One mentioned there would be a really exceptional place to go to watch -" what? What had been supposed to happen? The legend was that humans were going to reach the heavens, so then - "the apotheosis. Let's go!"

"Well..." She said, considering, then smiled. "Sure, why not? You

can say ███ name though."

Waver spun, wildly, looking for the - _there_. The red exit from this doomed world was a crimson star in the distance.

"Let's hurry," Waver said, taking her hand in his, "The emissary from -" Takamagahara, he tried to say, and what came out was - "the Pleroma is already there."

And then he ran, completely ignoring his companion's initial protest. He ran, and ran, and ran, pushing people aside, frantically shoving them away, the streets of the city all but a blur, and it wasn't really the fall of the tower he was worried about - that was an abstract fear.

But he didn't want to live in the same reality as that horribly alien _thing_ wearing the shape of a human for even a moment longer than he had to.

The entire encounter was playing in his head over and over again, and each time, each and _every_ time, the disguise it wore began a little less perfect, the words it had spoken, a bit harsher, decreasingly comprehensible, more and more _obvious_ as proxies for ideas that would destroy the mind of any human trying to understand them.

He was distracted from those memories when Leika's fingers slipped from his grasp.

Waver came to a halt, and turned. Leika was staring up into the sky, staring at a figure without identity - no, a giant ( _there were giants in those days_ , Waver recalled) - and a tiny figure - the God, Waver realized at last, connecting the dots from previous conversations and his own utterance - holding a spear of light.

Perhaps Iadabalaoth said something, if only because it would make the words the followed more explicable. But if it did, Waver didn't hear it.

And for the only time in his life, he was glad of that ignorance.

The giant above the air, the Original One, spoke. "This is betrayal. You have _named_ betrayal!"

The God didn't respond with words. It simply hefted its spear, and threw.

The thorn of golden light struck the figure in its heart, and exploded outward, a ragged sphere of light that consumed everything in it's path.

And, just like that - without any drama, or glory, without any epic last stand, or final struggle, without any ceremony that might've marked the significance of the event.

The Original One, the person who had built the Tower of Babel, fell.

"Hey - Mage?" Leika's voice was shaking. Hard. Nearly on the wrong side of sane. "What just happened?" She pointed at the titanic figure, sprawled against the dome of the sky, alien sunset shining through the hole in its heart. Involuntarily, he remembered the shattered sky on the other side, and -

He breathed in, involuntarily, convulsively.

The hole and the body.

They matched.

"What's that?"

_They matched._

"You don't want to know." Waver said, balanced against the edge of despair - and that was the last thing he said before the God drew a golden bow from nothing, began to pull on its string

and spoke a word that

was in no way

shape, or form

ever meant to be understood

by the fragile limits of human conception

  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


**"Ȩ̴̷̀͠N͞҉̸̸̡L̴̷I̕͠L̴͟͜"**

it said

and broke the minds of a nation upon it

Silently, with terrible deliberation, the golden stars began to fall.

  


  


  


##  _**Unlimited Blade Works** _

  


Somewhere there is a sword. See it in your mind. It's old. By human standards, ancient even. Something that's lived through and in and across the history of the earth. It is not special, or intricate. The hilt is elegant in its simplicity, and made perfectly for the hands that would wield it. The pommel is undecorated, and the crossguard likewise plain.

The blade though, is twisted; warped, and long past the point of breaking - and yet, in spite of this, or perhaps even because of the strain within the bone of the steel, it is still just as strong as the day it was forged.

But truly, to discuss this sword we must acknowledge a certain, salient feature of its description; something which is not a part of the blade, but, nevertheless, as essential to understanding its meaning as any of its facets.

Blood. A thousand years of blood. The blood of the innocent, and the guilty; the blood of monsters, and of saints; the blood of martyrs, and of cowards; the blood of humanity, and lacking that of just _one_ man.

Somewhere there is a sword which has no name, and it carries a legacy far more terrible than any that do.

And now our perspective turns, that blade twisting until its tip points down.

Then, the sound of wind, the sensation of air moving across the edge.

A terrible sound, like a tectonic plate being peeled from the flesh of the earth by the hands of god.

The sword opened his eyes,

and the darkness of metaphor was gone, replaced with a world - the Emiya and the First Ancestor embedded kilometres deep in a brown sky, falling through an ocean of gears. The jaws of the First Ancestor were opened wide, braced against the laws of this alien place, trying to crush them with its jaws and tear them to shreds with its voice all at once.

But the world held, and its avatar, scowling, sent a crimson spear into the beast's throat. It didn't do much, but it did still the horrible sound.

The white, wolflike living being snarled, folded its flesh around the spear, and did something impossible.

Smashing all rules of proportional strength, it reached out, and embedded its claws in the surface of one of the gears suspended in the sky, a specimen of steel so large that Primate Murder was a mote before it. In the next moment, it had torn the thing from whatever physical principle held it in place, and _threw_ the gear at Emiya, letting it's own body be dragged along with it.

The Counter Guardian watched the oceanic mass of metal approach him coolly, and in the moment before it struck, held his hand out before him - and did nothing more.

The gear collided with that outstretched palm.

And came to a perfect halt, a thing miles wide stopped by a speck.

Thought still falling, Emiya's course hadn't been altered at all.

Then he smiled, and with a casual gesture, flipped the orientation of the gear that its teeth pointed to the horizon, and slowed its descent, just enough so that on it, he could stand.

Moments later, the First Ancestor tore itself free of the metal, folded itself though the gaps in the gear, and faced him against the ground.

"Try using your own strength against me," the Counter Guardian offered, "But not this world. It is all I am."

The Beast of the World didn't react to that, at all.

If it bothered him, he didn't show it. He only took a step forward, and then another, and charged and was charged in kind.

Speed was not a word for what Counter Guardians did, nor could if fit the movements of the White Dog of Gaia. Speed implied motion, and both were moving at a level well beyond anything that a human would have recognized as such.

Still, as Emiya arced forward, two blades appeared in his hand, one white, one black, neither sufficient to the task before him, but brought out for the sake of nostalgia alone. As he did, Primate Murder flowed into a new shape, becoming a perfect expression of a beast that killed by sheer speed alone.

"Gate of Babylon-!" Emiya forced out, and a crimson ripple appeared in the air before him, another further away. Without hesitation, he ran into it -

\- and slammed into Primate Murder's side with the force of a siege engine. They both tumbled through the air against a surface not moving nearly slowly enough to provide more than a fraction of regular gravity, Emiya focused briefly on what needed to happen, and then they were surrounded by dozens, then hundreds of copies of Kanshou and Bakuya, Broken down to the last. Normally, they should have only fallen to the ground, but here, in Unlimited Blade Works, he could do a bit more than just create swords - he could append histories to the blades as well. And so every copy that appeared "remembered" having been thrown by their wielder, and in every case, that wielder was the same man rolling across the surface of the gear, now falling with such terrible velocity that its bottom surface had actually begun to heat and trails of flame were pouring up the sides of the narrow corridor of steel.

Emiya kicked off of Primate Murder's body, through another opening in the Gate of Babylon, appeared at the far edge of the gear.

A moment later, the cloud of broken blades converged on the World Beast, doing as much damage as they had the ability to - little, if any.

While Primate Murder endured under the onslaught, Emiya closed his eyes, and focused, feeling the contours of a certain sword's sheath in his mind, recalling every detail, then working _backwards_ , tracing its history, its making, and then its concept. Then with the practice of a thousand years, he breathed form into idea, and held that sheathe in his hand. Having created it, he let the blade meant for it _be_ , an act easier than breathing itself.

The attack he had set to occupy the World Beast had expended itself in the mean, leaving a pile of warped and twisted fragments of metal that exploded outwards less than a heartbeat after Emiya finished creating the blade. A white streak blurred towards him from the expanding cloud of shrapnel, outpacing the same with speed he couldn't hope to match, and in response, he settled his posture into a distortion of an _Iai_ stance, changed to work with the European blade he now held.

This is how one shoots.

First, one sees the target.

Then, one takes aim.

To take aim is not to lead the target. This is conceit.

To take aim is not to know where the target is. This is delusion.

To take aim is not to move the bow. This is ignorance

To take aim is to become the target.

To become the target is to forget yourself.

To release the arrow is to choose to die: because you are the target, because you know your vulnerabilities, and the moment the pressure of the archer's finger leaves the bow, the arrow is already there - because the future you have chosen is one where its head is buried in your heart.

 _Iai_ is not shooting.

But the principles are much the same.

' _I am this life, and die._ ' Emiya felt his hand tighten around the hilt - felt his claws score the world - felt a last breath fill his lungs - felt his jaws open wide, and - chose to kill himself - chose to kill the enemy of the world.

" _ **Tyrfing**_." The word was barely more than air.

The Sword that Killed When Drawn left its sheathe, and wrote its curse into the history of the world.

And then, Primate Murder, the White Dog of Gaia, the First Dead Apostle Ancestor, Beast of the World and the First and Natural Antithesis of the Human Kind -

\- was cut in twain -

\- and died.

"That's the middle," the counter guardian muttered.

Emiya turned his back on the corpse, staring up into the sky, and shouted, "I don't care what your master said! You live to kill humans! That is your _telos_! That is your _raison d'etre_! _Kill_ _me_!"

For long moment, only the howling of wind was his reply.

Then, a crimson point of light blossomed in the air, and a sound above the concept of sound projected itself across the world of Unlimited Blade Works, shaking the bedrock of the world itself.

Emiya stared up into the sky, watching, as the point of light pulsed, slow, then faster and faster approaching a frenzied crescendo - and then, flickered out.

At the same moment, the body he had turned his back to become powdery salt, and blew away on the wind.

And then all at once, it appeared.

Without warning, without transition.

And without any hope of escape.

The true nature of the World Beast exposed itself, bleeding into existance.

A white dog larger than the sky.

"Archetype of Earth," Emiya murmured, "we meet at last."

Another of those terrible cries, as an arm - not a leg, but an unmistakeable _arm_ \- fit to anihilate continents arced down to smash the world.

And Emiya thought, ' _I've won._ '

The Counter Guardian lifted his hand into the air before him, and his fingers closed as if around the hilt of a blade. The structure of the world began to shake, and distort, every degree of freedom bending away from Primate Murder, its strike growing father away by steady degrees as the world bent towards and then into the Counter Guardian's hands. The brown sky, the industrial smog, and rusted gears, and the hill of swords itself twisted, distorted, and was torn from Emiya's feet as the hand grasping the world moved up to, and then above, his head.

Space folded and bent, the world being constrained until it looked as if Emiya and the World Beast were falling through a void, the White Dog of Gaia's body emitting faint light, otherworldly in this place, and Emiya holding a universe in the shape of a blade in his hand.

"Ten thousand years, Gaia. _TEN THOUSAND YEARS!_ " He roared, "- But I saw them _all_!"

The world that the Archetype's claws had been aimed at destroying was gone when they crossed the place it had been, the attack for nothing.

And scale had been destroyed. The Archetype of Earth was still larger than Emiya, but no longer was it outside of his scope. Primate Murder snarled furiously at him, tensing for a last struggle against the Guardian of the Balance sent to destroy the very thing it was trying to defend.

Emiya held out his free hand, and starlight collected into a bow upon it. He looked at Primate Murder, the rage he had felt moment before having drained from him entirely, leaving nothing but a terrible, deliberate calm.

"You never had a chance of winning this battle, Gaia. Not like that."

And as he said the words, almost as if it realized what was to come and the futility of resisting it, the Archetype that stood as a knife against the throat of the Human Kind grew still, and silently met his eyes, crimson crossing amber. The furious evolutions of its form, which had never once stopped over the course of its life slowed, then came to a halt, and the scope of its existence dipped into the world that humans could know.

Emiya spoke seven words, and two of them were not as they should have been.

Then, the world of swords in Emiya's grip was consumed by flame and what was left in his hand was a sword of worlds. It was old. Ancient by the standard of man, and streaked with ten thousand years of blood.

Slowly, as if with great reluctance, that sword flowed into a new shape, and cracks of light wept down its surface as it Broke, Phantasm transcending into Form.

The archer knocked the arrow, and faded into the life and story of a world four billion years old.

_I am this life, and die._

One side of him watched calmly, as the other's eyes widened in surprise and realization.

Then, both shot.

And the dark was lit with the fury of the sun.

  


  


  


##  _**Futilit Incept** _

  


Here is clarity: Every second distilled into eternity. Every action its own myth. Meaning, read off the air and rained into your soul. A time of decisive, furious movement.

Those few and precious moments write themselves indelibly, and become the structure that defines one against the world. They bend and reshape the nature of your soul, and spell the concepts in your name.

These moments are the only thing any one human being truly has, to separate them from another. ( _And isn't it a tragedy, when a person has none?_ )

Now, here, in the heart of a dead city, running from the sky itself, Waver Velvet returned to that state, and saw everything.

As much as his final charge with his King.

As much as the day that he had turned the entire problem of magecraft's decline on its head.

As much as the day that he had stood before the Vice Director and won the smallest measure of her respect.

The stars were falling.

And they fled before them.

⅌

She was running, as the sky fell around her. Muted were the screams of the others, as a desperation she couldn't understand filled her with the simple and animal need to run. To run, to run, to run _to run!_

The Name of All Downfalls was declared, once more.

And that selfsame conceptual shock blasted out, redefining the world.

But she wasn't alone.

A hand held hers, and then tugged as she faltered. And instead of sinking to her knees, though it was hopeless, pointless, though continued flight was utterly meaningless, she found herself following in her companion's path, and matching his pace, as they both fled before the storm.

Just behind them, one of the spears of light touched the ground... and the world itself unravelled beneath their feet, taking them with it.

And then there was nothing everything a world of chaotic conjugations of searing chaos but it was gone was _gone was gone no name no self no identity no soul not now nor ever and never again_ \- **this is ridiculous** \- _stillborn dead and unviable_ \- **as if I can die here** \- _what is death when nothing ever was -_ **and yet I define myself against you** \- _accept and decay deviate and weaken all degrees of freedom point to downfall_ \- **perfectly absurd**.

From the chaos, asserting his independence against the conceptual attack, Waver Velvet awakened on the threshold of existence - and crossed it, pulling one other in his wake -

\- right into the patch of a collapsing skyscraper made of basalt – and then something Leika couldn't understand. Understanding. Leika shoved Waver out of the way, and _screamed_.

And Waver Velvet saw a miracle. The building stopped, listing slightly - and then began to glow. Leika, bracing her hands against the air _grasped_ it, somehow, in a way his mind couldn't understand, and then compressed it into a single white hot sphere - and then with a deafening noise, she threw it away from the city.

It could only have been marble phantasm.

A _human_ using marble phantasm.

_What the hell!?_

On the other side, Leika was just as confused.

 _I...why did I do that?_ Instantaneously, the answer provided itself: she would have died. And intellectually, she understood what that meant, but her soul recoiled from it.

Death was what?

Death was -

failure is as failure does  
and behold  
the silent rot in all things

A hand clapped down on her shoulder.

"You... saved my life." And that was wrong. How could Mage understand something so horrible, so easily?

But then there was no time, as another of the shards of light struck close to them, and they were running once more, towards something, with purpose, but with purpose that only Mage could see.

⅌

They had returned to pandemonium, and the building that had tried to fall upon them was the least of it. What Waver had mistaken for stars, weren't. They were spears of golden light. Where they struck, the world unwove into a seething void of white-beyond-white. As Waver drew himself to his feet, he watched buildings crumble into spheres of chaos, witnessed families die, and saw that - strangely - nobody was panicked so much as utterly despondent.

Waver took a step, then another, and began to break into a run again when the ground heaved underneath him, sending them both tumbling end over end. In the chaos that resulted, as the surface of the plaza convexed upwards, Waver lost track of Leika, and barely avoided a pocket of unreality himself.

Others weren't so lucky - but but none of them seemed to truly care. Some went through the motions of running, the _act_ of escape, but it was... false. Facile. A vague idea, instead of an absolute imperative to survival.

Then, the centre of the plaza cracked, and a perfect black vertex ascended from it, the surface swimming with cursive characters, similar to and other than cuneiform. That vertex grew, and grew, and grew, consuming whatever pockets of whiteness it touched instead of being consumed, the red characters on the surface growing brighter as it did.

At first, it looked like a pyramid, but only moments later that perception was shattered. The obsidian cube rose from the ground, sloughing earth off of its body. Several of the spears of light struck it, and struck for nothing, for it was built of things stronger than the world.

When at last, it cleared the ground and Waver saw all it was, the meaning of the text swimming across its surface became clear. It was a lament. Perhaps the first.

Utterly simple in execution.

' _This is the ark of Artis, built to remember the world._ '

 _To remember._ Because _nothing_ could be saved.

 _Leika_ , Waver thought, and tore his gaze from the thing.

It only took a few moments of looking about to find her - she was the only one standing still standing.

"Leika! We need to go!" Waver shouted, running over to her position.

But she wouldn't move. She just stared at the landscape, at the falling stars, at the rising ark looking lost. God, she looked so _lost_. "Mage. Mage, what is _this?_ I can't -"

"I'm not Mage," Waver said, bending down, and picking her up. "I'm not. And _this_ -" He took one step, then another, and then with a twitch of his fingers had called on Volumen Hydrargyrum, and reinforced it to the utmost limits of his ability. "- I once knew a

king. And once, before he killed my own, he said that all dreams have to fade." Another set of gestures, and the _Volumen_ accelerated, closing the distance to the Road, and then smoothly connected to the aperture, setting them down on the crimson path

And just like that, their flight was over.

"The Original One wanted to reach heaven. No - you _all_ did. But when Humans go against Gods, it's futile."

Perfectly futile.

"That word isn't real," she said, "th-that word isn't...!"

"It is." Waver said. Leika silently shook her head back and forth, eyes wide, "No. No, you're wrong. I can save them. I can stop this. I can do _somethi_ -" She turned, and tried to jump off the Road and back into the City.

"You can't _,"_ Waver said, grabbing her hand before she could leap. "You _**can't**_ _._ "

"Stop saying those words!"

But then, Waver didn't have to say anything else, as a star travelling along a vector different from all others shot straight over the Road, and directly into the heart of the Tower of Babel. What happened next couldn't be described in terms of destruction. It existed right on the border of language's ability to describe.

The Tower of Babel had bent the world around it. It had _looked_ as if it was _merely_ kilometres tall.

The truth of it was likely large enough to swallow the gap between Earth and Luna.

And now that - _all_ of that - was tumbling down, and drowning the world in an ocean of flames.

Leika fell to her knees, and staring at the devastation of the place she had once called home.

She was beyond tears. She was beyond the ability to even understand what had happened, just as Waver was now beyond the ability to help her.

And he couldn't help that... compared to _this_ , death might have been a kindness.

He watched as the blue fire turned black, as the darkness of Etu encroached on the searing chaos that was all that was left of the city of Babel but for the one plaza that the Ark had protected. On wings of broken sunset-caught-in-stained-glass, the God flew over, to hover above the ark, and drew a spear of light more terrible than any of the others.

But in the last moment, the ark wavered, and tore a hole out of the world, leaving the rest to be consumed.

As the ocean of bright, fractilinear static left behind by the bombardment grew dim, though, one smiling figure became visible, walking into the shattered annex - one who wasn't the God who had destroyed the world, who wasn't an Alayan, fragile enough to be consumed, but another - one who Waver had seen on the way to the tower. The figure, a spirit of pure light, stood, smiling up at the God who had slaughtered a world and shouted a string of incomprehensible syllables up at the terrible form of Iadabalaoth, who responded in turn.

The God’s smile widened, and then, it spoke two words in the Original Language. "I disagree."

And then, it raised its hand into the air, and into a sphere of golden light which, Waver realized, he had seen before.

The chaos was all but gone now. It only remained around the figure's feet, leaving both nearly standing in the darkness that was consuming the world.

The Great God shouted out more of its incomprehensible language, an undercurrent of something in its voice, before finishing in Original, "You will lose everything!"

"No," Enki said, gently drawing a golden hilt from the sphere of light. "I will gain the world."

Thousands upon thousands of the shards of sunset that defined the Great God's wings began to descend, to crush the Heretic God - but it was far, far too late.

A black blade held above a head. Cuneiform in bright read writ upon the surface. A moment passed, with the shards of glass raining down, before, for the first time and the last, the three segments of the blade separated, and with force greater than the grinding of continental plates, began to turn.

And then, Enki stood, holding Ea, smiling rapturously up at the broken sky.

"You will destroy them! Condemn them to an eternity of death and rebirth and death again! _This is_ _ **not**_ _mercy!_ "

"My lord..." Enki's smile had cooled, but it was with absolute confidence that he said his last, as death approached him, "they will find a way." And then his gaze parted with Iadabalaoth, the Great God who had condemned the Earth, and staring at something beyond what humanity could see, he cried, "Awaken, Ea! For your purpose lies before you!"

And in the last moment, before he was destroyed by a thousand shards of sunset trapped in glass, before the shearing chaos of Earth-That-Was could be returned to the One Without Completion, before the destiny of a Planet could be writ in stone, Enki spoke two last words - and chiselled them himself.

" **-** _Enuma Elish_."  
la nabuu shamamu  
The entire scene contracted to a point of singularity, and then exploded outwards.  
shaplish ammatum shuma la zakrat  
For the second time, Waver Velvet saw the Truth of the World that Came Before.  
zu abma reshtuu zarushuun  
And for the first, he understood its context.  
muummu tiamat muallidaat gimrishuun  
When the light had faded, Waver and Leika were no longer alone.  
ameshshunu ishtenish ihiquuma  
Just in front of them, facing them, stood Utnapishtim, looking much worse for the wear, and Lorelei, holding a black staff crowned with something non-euclidean.  
gipara la kiissuru susaa la she'uu  
"Ah, El-Melloi." Utnapishtim's voice was drolly amused, "So glad you could join us. On the way back, you'll have tell us how..." The voice trailed off. Then, "- _no."_ The word tinted with such horror and perfect rejection, that for a moment, Waver didn't know who had said it, such was the distortion that it imposed on the speaker's voice.  
enuma dingir dingir la shupuu manam  
It was only when he looked up, and saw the utter desolation writ on The Director's face that he realised who had spoken.  
ina ki'am  
" _ **No**_ -!" Utnapishtim at once took a step back and leaned forward - barely - on his upper axis, as if he was at once interested in and terrified by Waver - or rather, following the direction of his gaze -

"Lei." one syllable. "ka?" And the last.

And Waver thought, ' _Artis?_ '

And then the Director's gaze left him, as he turned on one heel, convulsively moving towards the mouth of the Road, to look back at the City.

The city that isn't.

The city that wasn't.

The city that will never be.

But all there was now was Etu's darkness.

And in the mind of the God, in the mind of He Who Saw Life, in the mind of the first survivor of the City That Was, the knowledge that he could have _saved_ them.

  


  
And now,

and _forever_ ,

  


  


that last thread gone -

  


  


  


  


  


 

  


_It was too late._

  


  


  


  


  


  
  


  


  


_So here, an epitaph, for those lost in the fall_   
_their hopes for naught_   
**futility is all**

  


**Canto 7:221-223.**

  


  


##  **Beneath the Tower**

  


Space convulsed, and the Crimson Counter Guardian and Primate Murder were left on the ground. The positioning was... strange. It almost appeared as if the First Ancestor had a bloody hole through its chest; almost looked like the Counter Guardian had won, but -

Aikaterina was the first to speak, her voice quiet, but shaking.

"Do my eyes deceive me?"

And without even a hint of his usual irreverence, Mathais began to reply. But whatever he had meant to say was lost. For at that moment and with a single decisive motion, the Counter Guardian plunged his arm into the space right between the beast's eyes, and grasped something within its skull. He retracted his hand, dripping crimson, and in his grasp was a single object made of pure light. It was red. A furious shade beyond the limits of language to quantify. Slowly, regularly, and like the beating of a heart, it pulsed.

And when it did, not a single one of them was able to stop taking a step forward - towards it - an alien longing tugging at their hearts.

The Counter Guardian glanced at them warily, then murmured several words. A single ripple of crimson light formed on the air, and the Spirit placed the object inside. The moment the ripples vanished, so too did the foreign desire.

Finally, it was the Counter Guardian that broke the silence, projecting his voice with unnatural volume.

"Alaya is going to withdraw soon, and Gaia..." He trailed off, glancing back at the tremendous corpse behind him. "Gaia likely no longer has the will to fight. You should leave. Altrouge isn't going to take this well."

And then, with no transition, the man was simply gone, air rushing to fill the space he had occupied with an audible implosion.

There as a long silence.

"Gods and fire..." Mathais murmured, then shook his head. "C'mon. Let's get the the bloody hell outta here. Battle's done. I can feel the Vice Director and the others."

  


  


##  **Elsewhere Everywhere  
Without Out**

  


Staring up out of the the sea of chaos, the one thing not of it smiled, and mimed the flicking gesture of a chessmaster deposing a king.

"Done. Checkmate in three moves."

  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


The Game of Kings

Episode 1 - The Flood Myths

FINEM

  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  


# CODA

  


  


##  **Nine Years prior  
to ****the** **Terminal Grail War**

  


"Tell me, Lorelei. What do you know of the epic of Gilgamesh?"

"The legend of the King of Heroes?" Lorelei paused, collecting and organizing the relevant information, then spoke "He ruled over his city, but he was cruel - so the Gods created Enkidu, to be a companion for him. But Enkidu died as a consequence for Gilgamesh's sins. And after trying, and failing to return his friend from the underworld, Gilgamesh sought immortality. He made his way to Utnapishtim - and he told him of a single path where he might have found some kind of success, but... it didn't happen. At the last moment, a snake stole the Plant of Immortality from the King as he recovered from the ordeal of going to the bottom of the ocean to obtain it."

"Hm. Sin." Artis mused, "And why, I wonder, would you chose that word?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"'Why would you? El had yet to be born. Heresy was, but sin? Sin came later."

She shrugged. "Theology is at the very periphery of my studies. What is sin, but a crime against God, or the Gods?"

"And now we come to the heart of the matter. Crimes against the Gods. Gods, which are defined as what a human may _not_ overcome. And so the doom - fate - of humanity set in stone, _thus:_ Gilgamesh the King of Heroes who by that title stands as the standard of human perfection. He who rebelled against the Heavens and failed. The origin of futility. The edict of a Great God - perhaps even their Greatest.

 

 


End file.
